A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words

But what about a memory?  What’s the value of that? Kudos to the photographer who shot this image, John Blanding of the Boston Globe, during the recent royal wedding. I want to be her. The one person in photo who is truly living in the moment, enjoying the experience of being part of an experience. She is my new hero. She is taking it all in because her focus is wide and all-seeing, not narrow and aimed at one individual thing. I don’t know her, and never will, but I love her. I love what she embodies.  I love the look on her face.  She is in the now. She gets it.

I grew up before computers became household items. Our phones only went as far as the cord would allow them and they didn’t take pictures. You didn’t even know who was calling until you picked up the phone and said hello. We didn’t post on the internet because it didn’t yet exist. We didn’t blog. Social media didn’t exist. Socializing meant talking face to face. A different world. Not better, not worse, just different. I do have pictures though, albeit a lot less from my first 50 years of life when we used cameras, then in the last 10 years, when photography for me finally converted to the digital age. But memories? Oh, lots of those of course, many of which are not documented by photographs or videos.

In one of my previous blogs from June of 2017, Changing the Lens, I talked about someone not believing an event happened because there seemed to be a lack of cell phone video and pictures to support the event. I talked about focus, and how the narrow focus of a camera lens doesn’t provide the wide-angle view of life. There’s so much left unseen when we spend our days attempting to document our lives on our phones. Perhaps, again, not good nor bad, but somehow, for me, it lacks the authenticity of an experience. You’re too busy trying to focus the camera, thereby missing the experience.  And, truth be told, when you leave this world, and go wherever it is one goes, you won’t take you cellphone with thousands of pictures with you. The pictures, when the phone is turned off, will no longer even exist. My collection of paper photographs, spanning the late 1800’s through maybe around 2005 or so, will exist until someone throws the box in landfill. Either way though, they are temporary, as are we, and it is the experience which we will take with us into the next realm of our existence, not the photographs.

I want to be the woman without the cellphone. I want to focus on, and experience, the now. I did this a little bit during a recent camping trip.  Although I did, of course, take some pictures, we did several kayaking excursions during which I didn’t take my phone or a camera. There were dolphin, manatees, birds, fish jumping, a beautiful sunset, and natural beauty all around. While I do have some pictures others took, I just paddled, and enjoyed taking it all in, filling up my senses. And that’s good enough for me.

~ jwb ~