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Ok, I have three updates planned, two for everyone and one for just Liz and Jen... Let's see how many I actually get done :P Anyway, I wrote this late at night a while ago, and thought I may as well put it on my LiveJournal...
Why do we smile in photographs? When the light hits the negative, for a moment, the world is frozen. The moment is caught in reverse. It's an irony that the light that creates the picture can destroy it. Until we commit it to a more permanent medium, that is, when it's hiding it away in the darkness that destroys it. It is a fragile way we can fight against the oppression of time.
As one moment passes to the next, as one experience leads to another, the world is changed immeasurably, in a way that is irreversible. Accepting this fact, however, is always difficult. Change is difficult to accept because it terrifies us. We see the present as the happiest we can be, and that anything that happens can only serve to diminish that happiness. Perhaps this is a self-delusion; quite often we're not happy at all. But self-delusion is the way we get through life, deluding ourselves that things can remain the same forever and that we'll never have to face change.
There are some people who embrace the changeability. They realise the intense excitement of every moment being entirely different. They smile in pictures, I belive, because they are honestly happy at that moment. But those who cling to the past - why do they smile in pictures? It is the same self-delusion. The past is always happier; the photograph is the permanent frozen moment from the past. When all we have to draw our memories from is a photograph, the smile cements the happiness of past.
It is another irony that it's the very malleability of the camera's negative that allows us to create a permanence.
Why do we smile in photographs? When the light hits the negative, for a moment, the world is frozen. The moment is caught in reverse. It's an irony that the light that creates the picture can destroy it. Until we commit it to a more permanent medium, that is, when it's hiding it away in the darkness that destroys it. It is a fragile way we can fight against the oppression of time.
As one moment passes to the next, as one experience leads to another, the world is changed immeasurably, in a way that is irreversible. Accepting this fact, however, is always difficult. Change is difficult to accept because it terrifies us. We see the present as the happiest we can be, and that anything that happens can only serve to diminish that happiness. Perhaps this is a self-delusion; quite often we're not happy at all. But self-delusion is the way we get through life, deluding ourselves that things can remain the same forever and that we'll never have to face change.
There are some people who embrace the changeability. They realise the intense excitement of every moment being entirely different. They smile in pictures, I belive, because they are honestly happy at that moment. But those who cling to the past - why do they smile in pictures? It is the same self-delusion. The past is always happier; the photograph is the permanent frozen moment from the past. When all we have to draw our memories from is a photograph, the smile cements the happiness of past.
It is another irony that it's the very malleability of the camera's negative that allows us to create a permanence.