Awake

Awake
Originally uploaded by Zanalee
Took my iPhone out for a walk yesterday. The way I treat this thing, you would swear I just bought a new camera instead of a new phone. But I mean common!!! Look at that!! It's got so much texture, so much romance! It's hauntingly beautiful! I don't know how people achieved this effect in dark rooms but the more I see, the more I want to know how. I'm blown away by it.

It's kind of weird though, taking credit for this kind of work. I remember when I was in high school, a few of us worked with a professional photographer named Jim Belfon to print out the senior pictures during the year I graduated. They were these huge large format prints of all us graduating students and they were framed in the hall of the lobby and signed by friends or anyone. I remember that Jim was an odd kind of guy, a bit of a miser and very serious but talented. My dad worked with him as well years before I had actually, maybe before I was born.

Anyway, I remember reading this stuff in the 90s about these new advances in photography where you could add effects and put in things that weren't there and I remember feeling very much against it. I thought I was a photo purist and I saw that Jim was into that. I never said anything but at the time I didn' think it was "real" photography I hadn't even really become serious about it at the time. My friend Alexi and I would just go gallivanting all over midtown with my the Nikon my dad handed down to me and we made prints and put them in photo albums or up in our rooms like everyone at that time. It was taking pictures, not "art" not seriously anyway. Alexi did have some brilliant set ups for shots though. He was very talented with my camera, much more aware it seems than I, about it's functions and capabilities.

Now though, years later I understand a fundamental truth about photography which perhaps began unconsciously with the advent of digital photography, something I'm certain even many photo purists could not resist when it came about. All photography to some extent is a lie. Moments frozen in time is a device of our making. It is an attempt at control, for remembrance, for proof, for record. But in truth, it simply proof that time has passed. It cannot be captured. But I think it's beautiful to look back at something that no longer exists as it did in that second I think it's magical. I think photography is magical, and as with many forms of technology, it's always the person behind it who makes the mark of character heard. A machine is only as good as it's operator.