Photography is Time Travelling

I hardly ever stop to think that with every photograph I am freezing time, imprisoning a split second for eternity. That fact fails to connect until I review photos of times gone by. The act of viewing photography is time travelling, literally. When we do this we are glancing at a flash of the past, perpetually carried into the future. I feel like we tend to disassociate with historical images because they don’t look true to our lives. At least that’s how I seem to feel. These older images are faded, colourless and sometimes pretty rough in quality. We assume this is what the past actually looked like. But if we really think about that, we know it to be wrong. They had the same blue sky and rich green trees. I know this is a trick so I try to visualize how that scene would have looked with the naked eye. What was it that this photographer was seeing in real time? When I push my mind to saturate the grey I establish the connection. I am filled with wonder and awe to glimpse into an era and see a point in time which would have been lost to the ages without photography. It’s incredible that a short burst of energy in the universe was gobbled up by a camera at the decisive moment. I begin to stop taking image making for granted. I am creating an everlasting life for times otherwise lost forever.

Have you ever seen a colourized photo from history? Do you feel it is more impactful and relatable when it is, as opposed to B&W?

Girl Worker in Cotton Mill – Lewis Hine
Boy on Horse in NYC – Vivian Maier

Thanks for reading! You can check out more of my personal thoughts on my blog.