Photo by Karla Gachet
We are moved to tap into our emotions and record the experiences and moments we deem significant or interesting in our lives Pictures help us to make sense of the world around us.
The image becomes a gateway to a store of human memories that connect with other memories. But photography has also played a role in altering states of consciousness.
It is true that the image fixes, freezes, and frames a slice of reality. But the image also transcends reality as it takes on the trappings of symbolic meaning. We are a culture dependent upon symbols to communicate meaning, and pictures play an increasingly important role in this process. Symbols are learned conventions that are shared by members of the same culture.
Meaning is limited to how well we understand symbols. Pictures carry dennotative and connotative meaning, but it is in the space between the literal and the figurative that our emotions and intellect become active.
Human beings seeks control over experience through our relationships with each other and the environment. The ways in which meaning are created and shared in culture is a byproduct of this human proclivity.
We pick up a camera not only remember a moment, but also to have some sense of ownership over that moment. Most of the images we make fail us in some way because they cannot replace what we truly experienced at the time.
Over time, the context in which the image was made becomes lost in a jumble of other memories, feelings, and moments. However, some images transcend time, space, and the redactive tendencies of human memory. Some images transcend moments, because they either speak directly to some universal human condition or truth experienced by all, or they indirectly trigger the imagination in some way.
The camera has become an extension of consciousness and unconsciousness, seeing and imagining.
Turning to Karla's image, the viewer becomes engrossed in a moment that is remarkable in so many ways.
The convergence of form, shape, line, color, and the people in the scene act upon our emotions and intellect -- they feed our imagination. How this story is understood by the viewer is largely a matter of what the viewer brings to the reading. The story viewed here, the look on the man's face, the woman in the white dress holding a red rose, the diminutive elderly woman caught between the gaze and the object.
In our mind's eye we manipulate what we see beyond the literal meaning.
Consciousness is a doubling back, in our mind, to reflect upon the meaning of objects in a frame. This is where symbolism and creativity become significant. The picture does not, in this way, simply mirror reality.
We do not merely view a man and two women in Karla's image. As we dig deeper into understanding what the image means for us, we make associations, connections, comparisons, and gut responses to what we are viewing. Karla's image awakens consciousness through the act of seeing in remarkable ways.