The Power of Photography :: Personal Narrative

The Power of Photography I have never looked at anything as intensely as I have through the viewfinder of a camera. It may turn aroundm odd that my most intense experiences of reality have come through an artificial lens, only when a camera is a about cousin to both a magnifying glass and a microscope. It is not only the ability to see things in to a greater extent detail that commands our attention. It is something else, something about the art of photography that forces us to examine the world as we dont normally do. Normally we dont see things as they are. The familiar is forced into the background of our focus. Objects become heads. Our couch is no longer a collection of darks and lights, patterns and textures it is simply a couch. Have you ever implant something unusual about something familiar that seems very out of place? For instance, if you find some mole or freckle on your body that you never find before, do you wonder if it was always there? How could I have never se en it, you may say to yourself. I look at my arm (hand, foot) every day. hither your assumptions have been challenged. The arm is no longer the arm that we imagined in our head, and it becomes disturbing. Our lives have become predictable in the sense that we see symbols instead of images, and only upon close examination do we find discrepancies between the two. Walker Percy calls this the problem of symbolic complexes. In his article The Loss of the Creature, he describes the loss of such grand monuments as the Grand Canyon to these complexes. He states that it is almost impossible to experience the Grand Canyon as its discoverer did because people have already formed an idea in their heads, thanks to the myriad of tourist folders, postcards, and sightseers manuals that they have seen before the confrontation. Instead of coming upon this great thing and admiring it for what it is, sightseers come upon it and compare it to their already formulated expectations. The full situat ion is made worse, Percy says, when the tourist has a camera. In this situation, the tourist comes upon the thing to behold, takes a photograph, and leaves without ever really seeing the thing. He waives his right of seeing and knowing, as Percy puts it, and records symbols for the next forty years.