Waiting to Collide

Photography

Art is a creative representation of an idea. Literature is easy; the concepts are written out. Visual media are pretty simple, if you know what you’re looking at. Film. Music. Theater. Dance. So easy for me to derive meaning, to revel in the simplicity, or verbiage, or color, shape and texture of these magnificent people’s ideas.

Photography, the presentation of reality, didn’t fit my definition for so many years. And it plagued me. I don’t go by feel — but having to exclude photography from art felt wrong. It felt wrong because there is a dramatic difference between snapshots of the family dog and what we commonly delegate to Photography. Herein lies the puzzle edge that will link this medium to the rest of art, I thought. What was missing? Where is the idea?

I felt Austin for the first time in years tonight.

I felt the millions of molecules of Texan humidity. I could smell the dryer sheets, the old coffee grounds in trash cans, the sun-singed grass. The proximity of people, and the hum of the streetlamps. And I looked up.

I have been in this place so long, that I have forgotten what it is to Be in a place. I have taken for granted my physical existence. Lived too long in the complexities of thought and action, and neglected my five tethers to reality.

Tethers to reality. Our senses keep us from floating off into intellectualism. Keep us here with each other and with our homes, family dogs, coffee grounds, and dead grass. But somehow we forget these things and must be reminded.

We learn to take reality for granted, and by the same neglect, I had taken photography for granted. It reminds me to Be. It tells me that what I pass by every day is still beautiful, regardless of whether I notice it or bypass it in my hurry to think and act.

Look, feel, smell, hear, and taste reality, for when we are too frail to move and too worn to think, it is all we will have.  There.  There is the idea.  Large enough to encompass each camera, lens, model, and molecule of silver salt, turning up to the light as I to the sky.

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