photographs

For some reason that escapes my mind right now, I love to collect black and white photographs of people and places. It’s a little voyeuristic I imagine, but no more so than the silent endeavor of watching people as you walk down the street on your way to work each morning, something we all do. More than that though, looking at black and white photographs is like looking back in time, watching a moment as it was gently captured in a piece of paper.

I am constantly reminded of enduring memories and fleeting moods, of stories of ancient lore I heard one day in someone’s house on an afternoon while drinking coffee, many years ago. How’s that for being specific?

There’s a certain perfection to them though, you don’t need to worry about color, so you can concentrate entirely in the form, in the composition, in the mood of the scene. You wonder what was going on through the photographer’s mind at the time. But there’s also a sadness to them, a feeling of being old and tired, quiet and forgotten. It’s a kind of vulnerability that touches your heart like only a soft melody or a beautiful poem can, if you’re sensitive to those type of things that is.

Oddly enough, I have a tendency to see my life, or at least the memories I have of it, as a series of black and white images. I can’t recall a single moment in time when I haven’t closed my eyes to memorize an experience in the form of an image, an image that I quickly file away and use later to create stories and dreams that I put down in paper with passing words. This doesn’t mean that I am strict about the things I do, I often see shades of blue and gray here and there whenever I’m proving new ground. It drives me crazy. But I like the idea of being so familiar with a process through which you not only see life, but figure it out by applying a set of proven directives.

Look, I know this all sounds very proper and very scientific, let me assure you that nothing could be farther from the truth. Like everyone else I guess, I am just as confused and bewildered by the way life turns on you. Heck, it even makes me cry from time to time. However, I do spend much of time in quiet contemplation, taking a minute here and a minute there throughout my day to help me figure out which way to go next.

But in any discipline you run the risk of missing out on a lot of details, that is just a chance you take whenever you concentrate on something. How do you know if you’re not missing facts when you make a decision? How can you be sure you know the answers to all the doubts you have before you decide to act? Well, the answer to all this is that you don’t know, not for certain anyway, but that’s a good thing.

Wait, I’ll explain.

You can be very stubborn and try, for example, to juggle a thousand things at the same time, telling yourself you know exactly what you’re doing and, more importantly, that you can take it. But behind all this is the understanding that in reality you can’t do all those things at the same time and you certainly can’t take them all at once. Everyone seems to know this except you because, well because you’re stubborn. Regardless you continue in your attempt to do the impossible and while you may in the end achieve a thing or two, chances are you will not be entirely satisfied.

Sounds familiar? I thought so.

So you go on thinking there’s got to be something wrong with life, after all you’re way too smart and sexy to make mistakes, it can’t be you because, remember, you’re stubborn. Thinking it doesn’t make any sense at all when you give everything you have and receive so little, if any, in return, and then watch the next person hardly do anything and get all in the end.

There’s one thing missing in all of this, do you know what that is? Perspective.

Well ‘duh’ you may think, but believe me, often, very often we lose sight of the whole, we lose perspective in the things we do and the things we accomplish. We kind of forget to look at the composition and the shades and the scene because we’re so frigging fixed on the form that we forget about everything else.

Is this a masked catharsis? It may very well be, I don’t know. But that uncertainty that comes with life, the knowledge that you don’t know for certain whether or not you’re making the right decision is what validates life and whatever outcome your choices may bring upon. In the end you dust off, get up and continue down the road, that’s all that you can do, hoping that the next turn will bring… whatever it is that you are looking for.

As I write this I have in front of me a black and white photograph by Wouter Deruytter of a woman walking along the railroad tracks, I wonder what she’s thinking, I wonder why she was there in the first place and where she’s going. I wonder why she looks so sad. I wonder.

I wonder what makes a woman fall in love with a man.

Frank 09:42