As one who loves to capture select moments of my daily life in photos I start to wonder sometimes what the draw is when I feel so compelled to grab a shot before it leaves my proverbial frame. Am I making art or stealing a moment? Am I the observer? The archivist? The collector of treasured scenes? Or perhaps am I simply an outsider watching the scene unfold before me, akin to a voyeur?
Really, ponder this if you will. Is there a difference between one who stands anonymously in a darkened room simply watching life unfolding outside with keen awareness, and a photographer with camera in front of their face capturing life unfolding before them, this time with a sense of permanence as it is recorded?
Judge not the voyeur, for it is only a matter of time before you are the one being observed as you are photographing another. . .
I ask myself this same question when I look at the odd things I collect as well as the pics I take, and I am not a photographer. I have train ticket stubs and cocktail napkins and I also shoot bits of me in the world. I figure, in my head at least, it is my way of marking my existence on the planet.
ReplyDeleteThese are solitary acts, even when one shoots others. It is about the individual's gaze--what YOU see--frozen as a marker. But those markers are left for others to see, so it makes connections with others, now (if revealed) or in the future (when found, say after death).
Voyeur? Sure. Seer/seen. But for some of us it is a way of making a lasting connection with our world. When we leave this world, there is something, some record, that we were here. Maybe.
My concern, in the digital era, is that technology will continue its advance and no one will stumble across anything like the drawers of negs we have of past "voyeurs."
You as a digital artist, how will you make sure the gazillion images you make will be accessible to generations future?