As I was putting together this blog as a place for my thoughts about the here and now, I was intrigued by a set of old pictures that we have from my husband’s family. They are blurry and stained and some of them are curled so that you have to pull down both sides in order to see the people that are staring back at you from a time that we were never a part of, and yet it is a part of us. These pictures in all of their black and white and sepia glory are full of life. They are full of modern people who were living in their here and now. And realize as I am looking at them that to be modern is to be living in your here and now, whenever that now may be.
Looking at those pictures made me think about what it is for us to live in our here and now. Photography is so interesting because it lets us be in the middle of life and then to stop and capture a moment out of our days. We get to record an instant in a life that is made up of millions of moments and then to look at just that one moment and remember. My husband and I like to photograph. It is partly for the pleasure of capturing the light a certain way and seeing the world through a different lens, but often it is to record and remember. It’s nice to look through pictures and see everything from celebrations to the moment when we were standing in front of our car with a mountain range behind us, and we laugh when we remember that we were hungry and happy, but mostly hungry, there on that road in the middle of nowhere. The picture pulls us back to ourselves. To the person that we were, and the person that made us who we are.
Each of the pictures that I was perusing in the stack of dusty old photos were of real people in a real time, just like each of us. And yet, sometimes I think we forget that we are real beings situated in a world that is very much alive. I hope that this blog becomes a place to explore both what it is to really be, and what it is to be real, in the modern world where we find ourselves.