We the time-travelers

As an artist, I crave all beautiful things. And as I try to recreate them, I can't help but think, nothing can match up to the imperfection that is the natural world. Even though I am a painter by nature, I have always been mystified by the pristine quality of a photograph. Nothing can capture the simple essence of a moment like a camera. The almost perfect replication of the world holds a supernatural quality, where we can relive moments that have passed or never even happened. Photographs make us time travelers, often transporting us to moments we need to remember. They help us heal. And while some like Sontag may not understand it, the job of a photograph is not to explain a process, it is to capture a fraction of time in hopes of preserving it. Like all powerful art forms, photographs cannot be read verbatim, they must be analyzed and interpreted. To take any information at its face-value is pure folly; it is the duty of mankind to decipher the world around them. It is not the photograph that misconstrues the information, but the human that views it. And in that manner, anything in the world can be twisted. We see the world as we want to see it. Photography is an art: another form of self expression.  The smile we wear upon our face or lack thereof is our badge to show the world. In that sense, photographs are no less construed than the clothes we wear everyday. While they may not be the perfect example of our personality, they are a part of the whole. The minute, trivial details of a whole city cannot be captured by a single snapshot: it is up to the human mind to know its own limits, to fill in the blanks that cannot be explained. The power of the naked lens is to display a moment of truth: nothing else can capture the human spirit in its hope and sadness.