The Photographic ‘Moment’

You do not need to be a ‘behaviorist’ to see that ‘success breeds success’ – children and young people are likely to unconsciously set down in their memory traces of positive experience. Enough of these ‘comfort’ associations with reading, listening to sounds, making music with others, counting or crossing small streams can appear with the hindsight of adulthood to have been ‘formative’.

Clearing out the garage before leaving for college a young person may well come across a tick-sheet of attendances at a Yamaha music group, or evidence of participation in a long-forgotten triathlon. Photographs are always evocative of early, dislocated, lasting or significant friendships and acceptance by others, a need which can be served by a fleeting moment caught on a USB, old cellphone or letter. Some of the images can stop you in your tracks as the early experience is tapped into by the conscious mind.

It is logical that the more of these positive moments of self-regard and achievement and appreciation of others and of nature you can recall, the more you can rely on them as counters to periods of negativity or self-doubt, which, of course, are also integral components of growth to maturity. Recently I found an old photograph of a ‘common’, ‘standard’ waterfall – located, I recall, down two hundred odd steps in a forest ten minutes by car from a luxury beachside favored by tourists.

The luxuriant growth and different layers of fine to strong plants adjacent to the base of the waterfall made me attend to the beauty of that moment. Later I thought how easy it is not to notice the intricacies of a natural element which is so integrated with a more over-whelming feature such as the high but narrow spray of the waterfall acutely peaked a mere hundred and fifty meters above the viewing point below. The vivid clean spray mesmerized me as it moved across and between rocks, interesting in themselves, but also part of the ‘sight to see’. The poetry of such places may often be readily evoked many times over a life journey and the associated sensitivity and pleasure can almost be re-lived.

Some people are particularly alive to the creativity of such moments: out come their cellphones or videocams to record the intricacies for posterity, and a wider meaning is given to the throw-away comment, ‘Yeah, I take pictures when we go away.’ Increasingly we can be alive at any time to chance on a supposedly ‘ordinary’ experience of sitting together with a friend on a bench in a quiet public area, or to the over-powering and impressive surge of power which demands our attention if a sculptor has caught a moment in ‘action’.

The purpose so often is to cause us to attend to what we can ignore or miss in the rebuff of a busy and slighting overlook.

Of course a Turner landscape may be highly stimulating and retain its power despite the overturn of the period he describes, today very few people can afford to commission such a painting. More power to hand-held cameras, high-speed videos, sound capture with images, and the capacity to share the drama of the everyday, yet special, view! And, of course, our instant captures can be selected for enlargement and treated appropriately as an archive.