The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you'll soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you wisely invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
--Frank Lloyd Wright
Sometimes I can barely control my urge to photograph every leaf, flower, insect and tree I encounter on my walks, as I find them all so beautiful individually and in combination with their surroundings. I want to preserve them all just as they are, to give them the immortality afforded by a photographic image, such that it is.
My compulsion to preserve the beauty of life, whether plant or animal (including but not favoring human) is often overwhelming. I love to photograph people alone and in groups, but especially when they are with someone they care about and in a situation that many would consider commonplace, such as while chatting after a meeting. When I cannot control myself any longer I go up to them and ask if I can take their photo together; I have yet to have anyone refuse me this pleasure. Until I get the photo I feel a burden, a worry within me that if I don't take their photo they may never have their photo taken together, that it is my responsibility to provide each of them with this "proof", this evidence, of their relationship at that moment. I know that I'm not expressing my feelings as well as I would like, but I want to convey the need that I feel to take their photo and to give each of them a copy of the photo so that they might, like me, see the beauty and feel the joy that emanates from them and from me at that moment.
Perhaps I am just high on life at these times, or perhaps I'm suffering from OCD. Perhaps I feel unable to just "be" without a purpose, to live in the moment and enjoy the experience and accept the ephemerality of it. Or perhaps I fear that I won't be able to remember what I have seen without the photographic image to stimulate my memory. I don't know. It is probably a combination of all these reasons that produces my compulsion to create photos that preserve slices of life, beautiful life.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
It's loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
--John Keats
I want to help keep the beauty I see from passing into nothingness, to preserve the loveliness of the plant or animal or human face as it was when I experienced it, for its sake and for mine. As long as I have the image it will live, if only in my memory; as long as I have the image I will be able to remember and appreciate its beauty. Years ago I read a heart-wrenching story by a mother whose young son was terminally ill. Each moment with him was precious to her. She poignantly wrote of an image of him standing before her that remains vivid in her memory: "My heart took a picture."
What happens to the pictures our hearts take when our memories fail us?
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I look at my photographs I remember the beauty of the moments in which I took them, and my spirits are lifted. I am rich in photographs and in the memories they invoke, memories that too often elude me unless prompted by the images.
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