IMAGES evoke a thousand words. The play of darkness and light - a talented photographer will tell you, can be captured in a single frame.
To capture life, in a fleeting second, is what drives an artist to search and to create. In a photograph, that fleeting second can be eternity preserved.
A couple of days ago, while sorting through the kitsch that has accumulated through the years in my work files at home, I found several photographs, which ushered a bit of reminiscing.
A beach and a sunset. A farmland buried under volcanic flows. Silhouettes within a hot air balloon. The tombstone of an unknown soldier. A bridge in Europe, a loved one and myself.
Even as we brood over wasted efforts and lost opportunities, we find the continuity and nostalgia that photographs carry within them.
“If you want to see the invisible world, look at the visible world,” says Howard Nemerov in his enchanted essay On Metaphor. We often take for granted the ordinary. Yet, in the world that a photographer creates for himself and his audience, that ordinariness provides opportunities to grasp the nuances of his art - albeit in a subtle manner.
Each photographer carries within him his own personality. He is a whole person - intimate, frank, candid, ironic, wry and sometimes even judgmental.
His photographs mirror that personality. His photographs provide his audience a view of how he sees his environment, other people, life and his world.
We all become part of the everyday journey designed by the photographer to tease out the ineluctable within the everyday. The trip will go nowhere without our active participation.
Ultimately, what a photographer sees behind the lens and what he captures on film aren’t just well-defined images on paper. Images are sequential emotional, intellectual and even moral experiences that his photographs allow us to undertake.
The photographer paints sensory scenes, confides a level of intimacy that stirs our experiences and sensations, and sets up a magical interplay between the photograph and our senses.
The tragic and the funny, the profound and inconsequential, the obvious and the sublime; these are all captured on film, allowing us a glimpse of people, events and places we might never see in a single lifetime.
We find the most important thing that images teach us - which is life’s meaning in its pristine form. Photographs are not a repertory of clever stunts, but are a form of experiencing.
Those who still find themselves confronted with awe by something of the unaccountably marvelous in the hands of a talented photojournalist are perhaps touched by a faint, lingering spark of the magic of life within us all.