Why Photography?

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The moment you release the shutter your photograph becomes a thing of the past. The "Images"-folder on my computer is packed with pictures of moments lost in the timeline of my life. They tell of things I've seen and witnessed, of things that - for some reason - caught my attention in that particular moment and were registered by my camera. Most of them mean nothing to me today because that's all they are: snapshots of things gone by. 
 
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Then there are those photographs of the past that remain meaningful, photographs that tell stories, photographs I attach special memories to. It can be a landscape that reminds me of the day I met my future wife; a flower that evokes the scent of a life-changing conversation with a friend; the face of a stranger that made me cry for reasons I'm still trying to understand. These photographs point to something beyond themselves. 
 
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There are also photographs that tell of a past that wouldn't exist if it weren't for that particular image. A picture of a German explorer, taken just hours before he set out on his adventure into the jungle from where he never returned; a blurry image of a family in the American Midwest during the Great Depression; a headshot of a pygmy in Central Africa at the turn of the 20th century. Sometimes a photograph is all that remains from the past. A picture without a story, without a context. 
 
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And then there are those cases where the photographs themselves become history, where they write a story that defines one's biography and identity. My father took hundreds of pictures of my childhood. On special occasions like Christmas Eve he would spend the afternoon selecting the slides he'd show us in the evening, telling the stories behind them and thus inscribing those images into our memories. The memories I have are the photographs my father took. I wouldn't be the person I am today without those slides.
 
5  
As much as photography seems to be a captive to its past, I wouldn't be photographing myself if there wasn't a way to escape this curse. When I picked up photography a few months ago and began studying my Dad's photographs, I realized that some of them transcended time. Some of them communicated something that went beyond their visible, eye-catching elements.
 
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And then, when I lifted my own camera to my eye, strange things began to happen. 


This picture was taken by my Father in 1973. It shows (from left to right) my best friend Daniel, also a missionary kid, my older sister Priscilla, and myself drying ourselves in the sun after taking a bath in a creek we came upon during a trip in the Brazilian Sertão.


(Thank you all so much for your very generous comments on yesterday's blip. You've left me speechless.)