Potential

Posted on October 11, 2008

With 69 (hehe) days left I can’t believe it’s almost down to 2 months! Where did the time go? I got kind of sidetracked in life again and haven’t been studying the language like I should…but I have a feeling I’ll pick that up again soon.

The days have grown shorter, and each morning as I leave for work, a cool, damp air drifts about me, filled with the first hint of mid-fall. It settles on windows, perspiration on an overworked brow, frozen in the night and thawed before first light. Autumn is here and I’m ready for it. The summer was too long, something I wouldn’t mind forgetting.

I’ve been looking through photos on Flickr, exploring other people’s shots of their travels to places far and near and worrying that after everything I’ll walk away with nothing more than a memory and some snapshots that anyone could’ve taken - not that every shot must be a work of art - but it’s a valid concern. I very often have trouble truly expressing what I see or hear or think, and more often than not I look at a photo I took and I’m disappointed. I don’t say it often, it’s boring to hear. But it’s the truth. Evem the photos i love I usually feel like something isn’t right, something just wasn’t captured. Perhaps that’s simply the nature of photographs. We capture everything there is in a scene in an instant, ending the kinetic aspect of it all. If we do it right we suspend everything at its maximum potential, as if every dot on the page is one fraction of a second from the next second in its life, frozen perfectly on the verge of something. Look at any great photograph or painting and you’ll see it. Great works always seem like you could reach out and touch them and they might reanimate, continuing on into the exact moment after they were locked in place.

Consider Jean Béraud’s painting “Paris Street Scene.”

Potential.

69 days.