Do you see a different thing in a photograph because something has happened and you have changed or do events that occur after the photograph was taken change the photograph in some space time dimension that we have yet to understand?:
Okay what triggered this? I have a photograph or my older brother on my nightstand. I printed it out after he died. He’s about 40-ish and sitting on the back of a truck after a day of surf fishing. To me he looked tentatively happy and I could see the toll that his Vietnam wounds were taking on him. But he loved fishing so I felt this had been a happy day for him.
In September of this year, two months shy of the 2nd anniversary of my brother’s death we took his ashes out to Montana and scattered them. I was dead set against doing this but we had promised Jerry we would do this for him so my younger brother and I went out to do it. I was unsettled about the idea of casting what was left of him to the wind and not knowing where he was. However as we set about dividing up the ashes and scattering them I had such a feeling of happiness overwhelm me that it surprised me. I felt it was my older brother trying to communicate how happy he was to be back in Montana and Joe felt it also.
My brother Jerry, this is how I see him now on the return from Montana. Okay last night when I went to bed I had another shock the photo I have on my nightstand looks happier than this photo which I took out of my digital files and cropped to fit in the post! Go figure.
The surprise was when I got home and went into my bedroom, I had the shock of my life. The photo of my brother had changed. He looked robust and wildly happy. It was the strangest, oddest and totally unsettling experience. So what changed the photography? Post in the comment section your take on this.
A week later my nephew came by. I was telling him about scattering the ashes and the location we had chosen. Then I tell him about the photograph. He takes this information in but has nothing to say.
Another week goes by my nephew comes rocketing into my house. “Auntie, he says, “You know how you told me about Uncle Jay’s photo and how you thought it changed!” I nod. Meantime he looks as though he has seen a ghost, “Well,” he says, “I was cleaning out some draws in my house and I came across my old high school year book. I was thumbing through to find the football team and look at this!” He takes out his phone and in some magically way that I don’t understand he manages to bring his high school year book up and shows me the photo of the football team. “Look at this,” he says. I look at it and then I say, “Why is this fellow faded, or lighter than everyone else.” “That’s it exactly”, he screams, “he died!” So I look at the photograph to see if the original was exposed wrong but no, there is no technical explanation for it. Then my nephew says “I am telling you Auntie, the photograph was perfect and he was not faded when the year book came out and he was alive!” So the two of us look at each and do the woo ohoo sound.
Two days later my girlfriend Maria calls me up. She was talking about last week’s blog and the Shades of Relatives. Then she said to me, “Do you think photographs change because things change?” I say cautiously, “how do you mean?” “Well,” she says, “You look at your work all the time. Some of it is old, does it change.” “If you mean, does it look different to me, yes but I can’t say why that is. Sometimes I think that it’s because I have changed so my perception has changed and then what I see in the photograph is different. But other times, I feel something mystical has happened that I don’t quite understand and that the reality of the photograph has been altered from when I took it.”
“That’s what I mean,” she says. She offers nothing more, so I say, “And what prompted this?” “You’ll think I’m crazy.” “Of course you’re crazy, your my friend, so tell me.” “I found this box of old photos, from maybe the 60s and 70s and they looked so raw.” “What do you mean, raw?” “You know, some kind of innocence, not posed and real, real in a way that I don’t see in more recent photographs.” Then she says, “Do you think the images change because we change?” I have no answer for this because I think they do.
I think we do not understand the nature of reality and how it works nor do we understand time. Some of it of course has to do with changes in our own self which alters our perception of things, which doesn’t necessarily make it any more real than it was before we altered our perception but it does allow us to see something else. And there is the whole realm of photography not being static the way painting is, because it is done in real time and perhaps, if time flows both way, it can flow from a future event back to a previous event and alter that moment in time in the photograph. Ok that’s my take let’s hear from you all out there in blog land.
J. Leone 