if you’re a photography major like me and you ever doubt the credibility of your program and what they make photography out to be, please watch this and trust in everything that lies outside of these educational based contrived claims. tell them that there is beauty in simplistic photographs such as these, those with a raw purity, those bare yet full of expression. a moment stopped in the eye of a lens, immutable, lingering forever through mutable reality - these are the photographs that make hearts feel pleasurable pain, like a warm emptiness realizing these easy moments have come and gone. they are once, always were once, will continue to be once, until death tears us from time and space like life tears a child from its’ mother’s womb. moment after moment after moment, never repeating, never returning. the only manner in which we may return, aside from a subconscious reawakening, is through the photograph. we recall each moment, let it be a tedious one or a dismal one or a glorious one, as a moment of our past caught in the web of present. one of the most beautiful things are these photographs, where a moment you will never relive or be able to replicate is shown to you in all it’s simplistic glory, just as you remembered it.
i get tired of people telling me that photography should be dramatic and salient and obvious and look! at! me! because i don’t think that’s what it necessarily should be. it should be all about moments. naked photographs are just as striking in it’s subtlety.
a moment in an ordinary life. no other kind of photographs matter.
(La jetée, Chris Marker, 1962)
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