An attempt to “freeze” time – or the desire to better understand ourselves? What does our love for photography say?
Double first. I love taking pictures very much. I like to watch me change.
Double second. I love taking pictures very much. I like to watch myself NOT change.
Both of these confessions somehow coexist in me. In any case, my passion to act is a competition with time. Who wins, so to speak.
Maya Plisetskaya was asked if there was a turning point in the history of ballet, when everything started spinning at a different speed. She replied: of course – when the video appeared! Here we, they say, understood where to throw our legs. So, my desire to be photographed at every opportunity has the same task – not to miss an important turn.
Turn in what? In a personal biography? It is ridiculous to give this treasure under the control of the lens.
In your own appearance? Well, what are you, I won’t rush to call plastic surgeons, having discovered an unaccounted for wrinkle! No. A photograph – I’m sure – is a camera tracking something deep.
Photography most successfully brings me closer to me, allows not only to compete with time, but also to cooperate with it.
I won’t argue that the nature of photography has changed. Once it was born from a dialogue with the master, with its own mood, emerged from a whole ritual of preparation, waiting, hidden reshuffling of internal roles – it is clear that photography was a value due to its rarity and laboriousness. In the case of portraits, she is always staged, a little playful.
With the triumph of the selfie, this whole philosophy went downhill.
It’s like giving a coffee lover a coffee-flavored tablet with a tonic effect. Will he be pleased? What about porcelain? Aroma? Drawing on the bottom? Likewise with photographs.
Clicking yourself a hundred times a day seems unthinkably exciting – but so is the age of selfies – like a butterfly. Interestingly, the selfie is a product for the public to see, for mass use.
It’s just that, of course, it also makes sense to show a photograph on occasion – but only on occasion … In general, if you’re lucky, your alter ego will allow you to look at you from different angles. After all, someone else clicked you: he chose the exposure, made you freeze, turn your head. Ah, every hunter wants to know what the other (the hunter) thinks of him.
Narcissus from the ancient Greek myth looked into the lake and fell in love not with himself, as is commonly understood. He discovered that he could exist outside of himself, and the shock was so great that he forgot about everything in the world – even the beautiful nymph Echo!
Here we are – having barely groped for the public unconscious, the first thing we did was to release our parliamentarians: books, paintings, films, photographs. Everything in which we can reflect, satisfying the curiosity of the majority as much as possible and thereby justifying our existence. All our gadgets are a second skin, our next expansion in the Gutenberg galaxy1.
And of all this carnival, my photograph, the one in which I look into an insatiable lens, is perhaps the most successful in bringing me closer to me, allowing me not only to compete with time, but also to collaborate with it, with its brilliant ballet. Cheese!
1 The Gutenberg Galaxy. Becoming a Typewriter is a book by Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian literary critic, sociologist and cultural scientist.