2018
PHOTOGRAPH OF WATER
A few years ago, I took a photograph of water. Several years have passed, but that photograph still retains its significance to me, not for the subject itself, but for the memory and moment it represents.
I find that in our daily lives, we live in a constant preoccupation with a multitude of similar moments and memories that no longer exist, but are projected onto the tangible and inanimate features of our world. Locations with no inherent value can hold untold treasures in the eyes of a person who has attached a deep story to a place whose true narrative varies depending on who is asked. We take this idea for granted, and yet, this attachment of memories and emotions to objects with inherent meaningless often causes us to waste our energies on miserable nostalgia that constantly demands for us to reclaim a moment that has passed.
And so, after I felt that I had invested enough and given all I could to my particular photograph of water, I re-contextualized it. I surrounded it with dozens of photographs of water, collected from Google’s “Find Similar Images” Tool. I trusted a machine to recall these images over my own investigation so that I could be sure that no human bias would contaminate. I repeated this process three more times, with photographs of equal significance from moments that cling to locations and make them “unique”. Over time, the startling result emerged - there was no measurable quality in any of my photographs that distinguished them simply because I remembered them as distinct.
Our experience in this world is relative and deeply personal, and sometimes, a simple documentation of place and time does not do justice to the built-up significance of a moment as it occurs or is remembered. The important thing is to remember fondly, realize that our ability to have “unique” moments is universal, and move on to new moments. Like water.
