Tonight I was persuaded to question whether there’s
something essentially unwholesome about taking a photograph. The common way of
describing the process is ‘freezing a moment in time.’ Well, as I’ve said often
enough, there’s no such thing as a moment; there is only flow. Dorothea Langue described
it as ‘taking an instant out of time.’ That’s probably more accurate, but ‘instant’
is an unfathomable concept to a mind inexorably persuaded to a finite view of
reality that is dependent on three dimensions plus time.
And so the idea of ‘taking an instant out of time’ began to assume a sinister tone. It seemed like grabbing a piece of the Primal Flow and
holding it against its will. It even held a faint echo of a recurrent theme in
folk tales – that of taking Death himself prisoner, so he can’t do his job. And
we’ve all heard the stories about ‘primitive’ peoples who objected to being
photographed because they believed it would imprison some part of them.
We say they were just being silly, don’t we? Well, now you
can say I’m just being silly.
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