Philosophy
Photography is nice, photography is bad. Just as much as it can preserve moments, it interrupts and takes away from them. I learned the hard way, noticing I wasn't experiencing these moments anymore, I was collecting them. Hard drives filled to the brim with thousands of photos and videos, but only vague memories. Memories that couldn't be recalled through these pictures because they weren't fully there to begin with.
Dilemma
There is a Japanese concept called 間 (Ma). Finding beauty in the space between things, the silence around them, the pause that gives meaning. Following this idea, everything is worth capturing, because you can find grace everywhere. Though I resonate with the concept on an individual level, in photography practice, it's a big problem.
Every time you reach for the camera, you make a trade. You isolate a fraction of time and space, preserving it indefinetely, while everything outside the frame disappears just as quickly. Just like that, a moment splits in two parts: one you keep and one you never fully experienced.
Meaning
So photography is not about capturing everything, that's something I didn't understand at first. If everything matters, nothing does. Meaning is not found in abundance, it is carved out through omission.
Photography is about very deliberate choices and intention. You can take a technically perfect photograph, but a truly significant photo you keep coming back to is characterized by a strong motif. You don't return to a photograph because it looks pretty, you return because it says something worth remembering.
Solultion
There is, of course, a very simple solution to this dilemma: You don't take the pictures. I do. So you can fully stay in the moment and still have something to remember it by.
And if you just want some pretty pictures for the wall, you might also find them here, but then my whole philosophical paragraph would have been for nothing.
