I love words. And I love photographs. The two might seem polar opposites — one flowing like a stream, the other being frozen and still — but they complement each other well. Hence this essay on photography. It’s an attempt to make use of one to explain the other.
Before we get to photography, let’s talk about words and images. These two are so deeply intertwined that it’s hard to imagine one without the other. As a writer you have a mental image of an idea which you put into words and the same words, when construed by the reader, approximately produce the original image in their mind. In this case, words act as a bridge between two identical images — but the bridge is not a straight line, it’s a circle. Images can do the same too. They can be the medium of communication, carrying words and ideas from the source to destination. This means, both words and images can be the source and destination, and even the medium.
Words, relatively speaking, are easy to understand or produce. You sit there, at your desk, and scribble as many things as you wish on a piece of paper. A photograph, on the other hand, is slightly different. It’s a visual impression that is constructed not by one but two architects: the photographer and the subject of that photograph. That’s the beauty of photography — nobody can do it alone. It is possible to have at least the illusion of writing in isolation, but photography does not foster such attitudes. It asks you to have a conversation — a conversation in which the time suddenly comes to a halt and that’s it… you have captured the eternity in a moment!
The critics might warn you that photography can interfere with reality. That it can become an act of spoiling a moment in order to preserve memories for future. However, it’s a choice you make. Do you want to be in that moment or outside it so that you can capture it? Photography gives you that option.
One can complain about photography at great lengths as Susan Sontag does in her book On Photography. But, even she could not deny the intransient nature of a photograph in a transient world. In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the world of photographs, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way. That certainty can be a great source of hope.
Photographs are wonderful treasures, more so if you believe that we are the sum total of our memories and experiences. Photographs preserve them for us, giving us identities which we would like to hold dear. Seeing a photograph is to revisit the moment which is gone now, forever, and no amount of scientific progress (or a holy miracle) is going to bring it back. Except… we have it already, in a photograph.
Reference books:
Kalampedia 