Paul Hogan Poem on Capturing Moments (and Maybe When Not To)
“Camera loaded, the light
near sundown blushes
the grey, beat wood
of the boathouse, flashes
along arcs of the waves.
Don’t photograph this. Don’t render it
immutable now. Let it
distort, let it unravel,
reconstruct itself.
This image will retell
this here and now for years,
without conclusion —
It will never change,
it will always be different,
we will never agree. For now,
let the light slip down
around you. Don’t
remember this yet.”
Paul Hogan, Point of Departures (Page 37)
Beyond the Quote (167/365)
In a world where the camera on our phone takes better pictures than most DSLR cameras from just a few years ago, where 4K quality can be held in the palm of one hand and activated with the push of one thumb, where so much of what we see and hear in the world can be so vividly captured and contained within the confines of a memory chip that’s smaller than a penny and backed up by an imaginary cloud—the line between knowing when to be present in a moment and when to capture a moment can become incredibly blurred. Hell, if we wanted to, we could record every moment we ever wanted to and store it into a neat and tidy timeline of moments that could quite literally make up the story of our lives. Rather than our life “flashing before our eyes” at the end, we could playback our lives in a flash with just a few clicks on a computer screen.
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