Footprints on the Path of Life: Photography

...for art may err but nature cannot miss...

Photography is that unique medium that lends veracity to the unbelievable while isolating the indefinable.

Decimating the sands of time, the camera does not discriminate:

• Anyone can take a picture. 
• A picture can depict anything.
• The very ability to capture a moment -- any moment, anywhere, anytime -- puts power in the hands of many while demoting the artistry of the few.

Photography is swift and merciless.

It teaches by showing us that which passes so quickly that we'd avow we did not see it. It teaches us about what we see by showing us the split second we did not catch.

Photography teaches us about what we see. It's a technology, ergo a tool, a means. It's an industry that is perforce grouped with the artistic, as the world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness... in a world of art it'd be impossible to isolate it's journalist.

Every photo is a story that relays to us the real-life fantasies of the world we live in.

Every photo is a fictitious rendition of a non-fictional account. Fictitious because no moment is meant to be isolated. Forced to stand alone, each photo-moment demands its viewer to recreate the story of the moments leading up to it, then abruptly leaving its viewer suspended in the mystery, isolated in the conundrum of frozen time.

Lost — Yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever. -Horace Mann

As the media of the universal WHY, Photography challenges preconceived notions. Time is not lost; the experience may be a part of the past, but the photo remains in the present, enabling us to look more deeply into our lives and the lives of others, applying the imagination, ever-capable of strengthening the human desire for better.

Thinking of photography in this light (and perhaps that pun was intended...) -- as the wordless philosophy, the philosophical technology of the evolving creatures of this earth -- reminds me of Longfellow's poem, A Psalm of Life:

Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are seldom what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

[...]

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sand of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.