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Candle Holder? Or People?
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I start going through approximately
three hundred or so
photographs
muttering "I should be doing more important things"
... or at least that's what I tell myself at first. A friend
of a friend sent them to me. "OK, I'll just skim through them now"
I think to myself "then file them somewhere and go through them
again later when I have time.". I look at the first one,
then the second one, then the third ... and with each new one I'm
taking more and more and more time, incredulously
realizing the
privilege,
the intimacy, the enormity of the unexpected gift of
this collection.
Slower and slower, I look in depth at each one, taking nearly three
quarters of an hour to go through them all, any other items I've
scheduled for this time now unceremoniously cast aside, overlooked,
forgotten.
It's an impossible task selecting the good ones
because they're all great. Whoever's pointing this
camera knows exactly what they're doing. These aren't
merely happy snaps, kind of like those you begrudgingly and
patiently, stoically sit through for someone's boring
vacation show and tell.
These photographs
prove photography as an
art form.
And what they each depict is equally artful. They each show, in
their own way, human beings fully engaged, fully communicating,
joyfully expressing relationship as the
source
of
who we really are.
And as I'm sorting through each of them, mentally I'm making notes
to set aside
showing the
protagonist,
the one around whom the crowd's milling, the one on whom all foci
are converging.
The photograohs showing
him
and his interactions and his inter‑re‑actions
with the crowd are clearly the
money
shots.
... or so it would seem ... at first. These are the ones,
the seventy or so I
choose
for
a project I'm working
on.
I choose them because they depict
source.
I choose them because they show
language
as the inspiration for human beings fully engaged, fully
communicating, joyfully expressing relationship as the
source
of
who we really are.
This is the core set I want for
my project:
only the ones which show him.
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