This post from Ashen is exactly the kind of thinking I hope to elicit. The belief she expresses is that simply being aware contributes and for all eternity makes ‘failure’ to be publicly approved superfluous. That is liberating; nicht?
When I take a photograph I stop time, from where I stand, from where I walk, from where I look. The image becomes inner, a pregnant, eternal moment. Artists who engage with the intimate reality mirrored in their surroundings might admit, or not, the erotic dynamics at play in this search for a glimpse of the beloved, an essence shining through the cracks from beneath fleeting surfaces. It’s not only artists who frame flashes of significance, everyone selects, does the stop-motion of perceiving, it’s how stories are made.
A self-portrait of Vivian Maier
In 2007 a photographic archive was auctioned off to recover debts for storage rent. Most of her life Vivian Maier (1926 – 2009) worked as a nanny. In her free time she recorded what caught her eye, predominantly in the streets of New York and Chicago. She captured poignant moments, like soul mirrors, in brief encounters…
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INVOLUTION: Science and God: Reality Redefined 
Thanks for re-posting this, Philippa. Though creative people are often riddled with doubt, it makes total sense to value the talents given to us and develop them, against odds, and to acknowledge the gifts offered by those before us. We all benefit from the knowledge compacted under our feet and the inspiration in the dust surrounding us.
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Yes indeed. The odds are long but people still buy lottery tickets! I have decided not to take any notice of the odds because the doubt arises out of them. Doubt, the great destroyer…
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Power through, power through, power through. For it is enough to know that only the knowing and the gifted doubt…
On a side-note: I’m convinced modern technology has extracted the soul of photography in the same way it has other forms of art. And I just wonder today, for the mourned film lost down the side-seat of a plane, whether anyone might still place such stock in a collection of photographs, or a photograph; I mean, from the very conception of each particular shot, to its owning…
Wonderful article. P, thanks for the share.
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I think what was implied was that the taking of the shots (lost) lodged the images in the collective mind. When I was a (bad) painter it was the concentration on the landscape that secured it. I suppose an intense experience of ‘mindfulness’ before that became fashionable. Just the mental recording made it not merely more vivid to the observer, but more real to itself. Perhaps the ‘soul’ of photography no longer lies in the photograph but the re-cognition? ‘Things’ are, I agree, being debased. We have not yet replaced things with visionary understanding- except a few like Ashen, the writer of this post.
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Fully agreed, Philippa. I think I was saying the same thing, and was certainly leading up to it. And do you know what? I wrote a long and elaborate answer to yours and have since – damn and blast – accidentally deleted it… It’s such hard work being obliged to re-write. Instead, I shall thus go forth and smash up the kitchen
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There is a nugget of value in the fury when a comment ( or first draft of anything) get deleted, and it seems to me to give the lie to all those edit edit injunctions. Always something fresh and never to be recaptured in the first draft, instant reactions, take it on the wing responses. Something always evaporates once expression is expressed!
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