Photography and such.

I once believed that photography was a bad thing.

I cannot recall where or when this idea developed in my head, but it was certainly a sad moment on the day when I first saw photography as a baneful process. Somehow I had come to the conclusion that taking photographs was a negative thing that eroded the natural beauty and order of the world. My best guess is that it stemmed from a project that I did in high school. The assignment, a black and white film assignment from my Photographic Science class, required that we focus on the idea of the fleeting moment, or that which is temporary. In all honesty, I cannot even remember what I shot for the assignment, but I do remember what the teacher, Mr. Bowmen Sr. (I had his son Mr. Bowmen Jr. for drafting classes in middle school), showed us as an example. The image was a silver gelatin print of a light weight scarf or strip of fabric frozen in a moment of delicate wafting in front of a window sill. The fabric had been dropped in front of the window on a sunny day so that the light passed through the fabric making it appear as if it were transparent and weightless, a beautiful moment in time captured to only last forever. I can assure you that back then I thought capturing such a brief and passing moment was a magnificent and romantic idea. It was such a pleasure to know that you could make such beauty last forever, but eventually my thoughts on the matter changed. I wish that there was a specific incident or quote or even a mild life change that I could pinpoint as having an influence on my new opinion, but all I can remember is that my mind on the matter did in fact change. I started to see the flaw in the acquisition of lengthened time. I realized that part of what made fleeting moments so beautiful was their brevity. Beauty is not purely a visual idea; instead it is aided by emotions and atmospheres, nostalgia and the out of place. I knew this then and started to resent photography because of what it did in opposition to these natures. I saw it as stealing the brevity and molding it into eternity, therefore removing an essential part of its beauty. The idea was unsettling. I can recall one time when in critique for my Contemporary Photography class my junior year at Tyler School of Art when the feeling was particularly strong. We were examining some of the past work from one of the three graduate students in the class. She showed photographs of oil marks on the street after the rain, rainbow splotches of grease and water. Surely they were interesting and beautiful and I could contribute to their discussion in critique. That was until the teacher mentioned the one thing that all of her images had in common, the fact that they all depicted temporary instances, little moments that could never be seen again. After hearing that, I was instantly reminded of the beauty that had been removed from those moments. I was unsettled and did not speak for the rest of class. I believed this idea of theft in photography until about February 2012, the beginning of my second semester senior year at Tyler. Criticizing Photographs by Terry Barrett was the book that relieved me from my false beliefs on photography. This book reminded me of something that I had known all along but failed to see in respect to the beauty of a moment. Barrett reminded me that a photograph is not a moment in time; it is not an instant or particular point on a timeline. A photograph is taken over a duration of time, whether that be one second or one one-hundredth of a second, it is still a measurable length of time. This knowledge enabled me to realize that photographs are not instances but rather build ups of accumulated light over a fathomable period. What a relief to know that the beauty of a brief moment photographed had not diminished simply because it had been photographed. It felt uplifting to know that I had no longer had oppositions to my own medium, and yet quite rattling to know that my mind could be changed in one unveiling moment.

But I beg the question, has my mind really changed? Uncertainty is bound to linger. But relief? Without a doubt.

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper.