I’ve always loved photography, not just the act of capturing a subject on film, but viewing photographs themselves.  It doesn’t matter if I know who the people are, or where the scene takes place, or anything about the photo at all.  I especially love to look at old photographs even though often times they make me a little melancholy.  There’s something powerfully immortal about seeing a photographic image, sometimes decades after the original photograph was taken.

There’s one old picture of my mother that I love in particular.  She must be about five years old, seated on the front stairs of her parents’ home, smiling broadly.  My grandparents passed away over ten years ago and then the house was sold and converted into apartments, looking a little like it did then, but still very different.  Even my mother has since passed.  However, when I look at this photo, it’s like she’s still alive.  There she is: smiling, happy; her life is full of hope and promise.  It’s hard to imagine from looking at this little girl that she’s ever had a sad or difficult day, although I know she did, even at this tender age.  It also makes me wonder at what she would have been thinking, how she imagined her future, and if she would have approved of how her life turned out.  It’s not that I think my mother died with lots of regrets, although I’d have to think she must have had a few, perishing at a relatively young age from a painful cancer, but I wonder what she would have thought then, at the moment this photo was taken.

Of course, my melancholy at this particular photograph could rationally be explained as simply the result of feelings dredged up about my mother’s death, the loss of her from my life.  I couldn’t find fault with that analysis.  However, the explanation doesn’t fit when I see other photos of people who are still alive, or people who are complete strangers, or even photos that contain no discernible people at all.  Some of the same feelings are evoked when I look at these photos.  I am sometimes overwhelmed by the emotion of looking at an exact sliver of time in life, a sliver that has no end and no beginning but is full of promise or joy or even captures sadness itself.

I’ve heard it said that some jungle tribes in less industrialized countries once feared photography, believing that a camera could capture a person’s soul.  I don’t know if there’s any truth to these rumors or not, or if they’re simply a product of the imaginations of overworked writers tasked with dreaming up new plots for Tarzan or similar black-and-white movies, but regardless of where it started, there might actually be something to this superstition.  However, instead of extracting and locking the soul inside the camera or photograph, maybe a photo can provide us with a glimpse of the soul.  Through the photograph, a part of the soul can live for as long as the photo survives and as long as people continue to look at it.  I hope that’s true.

"Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”
Henry Miller