Photography

A kind young woman called Sarah who went to my church is a photographer and just shared someone's blog post on facebook called "Date a girl who Photographs." I read it and liked it, thought it was idealistically and poetically written. What I liked most about it was the way it described a young woman as someone who saw beauty in virtually everything, including the mundane.

Photography is merely and only a way to capture beauty. A way to take a moment and eternize its visual components. But it creates nothing.

Painting, composing music, sculpting, choreographing dance, writing. All these things and many more art forms create beauty. They birth something that never existed in the world before. But photography doesn't do this. Photographers look at something that already exists and snap a picture of it, but they don't just look at it. They see it. They capture the beautiful so that others will say, "My, look at this photo! That must have been quite a moment." But if these spectators had been there and seen it with their own eyes, would they have seen the wonder of it at all? The photographer's job is to point it out to them, even though they did not create it.

However, when I found myself with a camera (when I had one), I believe that I actually missed out on what was going on around me. Being someone who has very poor episodic memory, photos help me remember where I've been and what I've done. Meanwhile, I find that while I am consumed with finding beautiful things to take photos of, I am much less attentive to everything else. I am only attentive to taking photos.

For me personally, does photographing take away from the experience or enhance it for future memories? Does it conserve beauty or does it rob me of seeing the world with my own two eyes instead of through a lens?

I'm trying to decide if it would be worth it to buy a camera, or even to borrow my sister's old broken one, and take it with me to Juneau. Surely I will see some marvelous things there that I will not want to forget! But also surely there will be plenty of other people there with cameras of their own there. Should I worry about it, then?

I am less concerned about this predicament than I am about a more internalized one: do I see the beauty around me? Are my eyes open?

Does someone want to take me to an art museum?

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. -Anaïs Nin

God bless.

P.S. Check out Sarah's lovely photography here.