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As If By Magic

caldrail

Entry posted by caldrail

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What does a photograph mean? On the face of it, probably not much, as it is after all a static recording of light received by a chemical or electronic process at that given moment. Sometimes it can convey information, or perhaps preserve a happy memory. You could say a photograph has whatever significance you place upon it.

 

Some people have a gift for photography. They manage to capture more than a smple recording of light. They capture movement, frozen for that instant, or a scene that invokes a mood. My own efforts at taking photos aren't really intended for public consumption which is probably just as well considering how dull they usually are. Perhaps it's just as well that I don't indulge in the worst excesses of the amateur photographer - the family album.

 

In actual fact, I've been very lucky in the past. So far I've only been caught twice with a family album to look through. Once by a young lady who was desperate to keep me there until she plucked up the courage to... Well.. You know.... The second time by the mother of a friend of mine who was, I think, feeling a bit lonely and just needed someone to talk to. Other than that I've gotten away with it.

 

Yesterday I got ambushed with some wedding photos of our relations out in New Zealand. The photo of the newly weds was pushed under my nose with particular care. I knew the groom. I'd met him as a troubled teenager and once gave him a swift ride in a sports car around Swindon in an effort to stop him freaking out at what was an extraordinarily dull family meet. He even tried to get me to do the same in New Zealand in a hire car and that after he'd narrowly escaped prosecution for wrapping his own vehicle around a tree on a rain soaked curve.

 

The woman he was marrying was a very pretty young blonde, who I've never met, and I haven't a clue who she is. But at that stage of the proceedings, I realised what this close encounter of the family album kind was about. My mother is at it again. Scheming.... Plotting....

 

If you haven't guessed already, she wants to play happy families. She tries this on a regular basis. It isn't that I wouldn't become a family man if the right circumstances came about, but it's the circumstances happening in front of me I don't like. The emotional manipulation annoys me most of all. Why can't she just ask me? Why can't she just accept things are they way they are? The answer is that she prefers to pull strings. It makes her feel clever.

 

A part of me thinks that she wants me married off not for my benefit, but so she can play the grannie to her own friends. The other part of me thinks it's all about making me conform to her very own fantasy of what I should be. Somewhere in all of this I'm just a means to an end.

 

Nice try, but wedding photos aren't as effective as magic wands.

 

Magic Books

Talking of magic wands, I see Gordon Brown is writing a book about the global financial crisis and what lessons we can learn from it. Maybe it's just me, but I thought we'd already cottoned on how to solve that. Not that I'm particularly bothered. I won't be reading it. His brand of magic is a little bit of a con-trick in my experience. In any case, when the news reporter asked when his book was coming out, he answered that he didn't know. I sense an global publishing crisis on the horizon.

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docoflove1974

Oooh...ok, similar gripe here, but from the opposite end.

 

I love putting pictures online...that way, I send the link, and if people want to see them, great. But if they can't be bothered, they can toss the email, and I'm none the wiser.

 

But lately, both with the trip to Hawaii last year and to Italy this year, I have people tell me, "Ooooh! You have to tell me about the trip! You have to show me the pictures!" And especially with the Italy ones--let's face it, I took 900 shots or so over 2 weeks--but even the Hawaii ones last year, people were completely tuned out by the 4th or 5th snap. They really didn't care.

 

Look, if you want to see the pictures, I'm happy to tell you the story behind them, what I was thinking about when I took the shot, etc. But don't placate me by feigning interest, only to realize that you don't care. I mean, if you know me at all, I will have lots of reasons for doing what I do, and lots of information behind my decisions...if you don't want to hear it, then just wait for the email link.

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caldrail

Funny that. It's almost as if they're merely being polite. Either that or we kid ourselves how interesting our photographs are. There was a time when I was working for a japanese company. There was literally nothing to do all day but sit twiddling our thumbs. Out of sheer boredom I brought along a cd full of my local scenery snapshots, and out of boredom, my two team members went through them, jpeg by jpeg. Perhaps that was why they stabbed me in the back and got me fired :) If they didn't like the photos, they only had to say....

 

As much as we value our own work, I think we have to face the inevitable reality that not everyone else will see the value of it. I learned that lesson in the music business many years ago. Every band in the world think they're brilliant. But out of all the billions of human beings in the worlds population, how many are truly regarded as gifted and listened to by the rest of us?

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docoflove1974

Very true...but I personally never thought of myself as much of a photographer. I simply wanted to chronicle my journeys in life, knowing that at some point my wonderful and seemingly permanent memory will fail me catastrophically, at which point I'd like to be able to not just point out a holiday snap, but tell you where I was, what I was thinking, etc. I just would like people to be honest...maybe that's too much to ask?

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caldrail

Maybe it is. It might also be that however enthusiastic you are about documenting your adventures in text and imagery, or even how interesting it actually is compared to other peoples, it often depends on your presence in their imaginations. A celebrity can make a sentence appear everywhere. I can't even get the Job Centre to get my name right.

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