Photography vs. legend

Thinking lately about photography and legend. And how the happenings of daily life could be turned into myth a millenium or a century for now, if it weren't for our obsession for documenting everything "how it is."

I almost don't want to take photographs anymore because it's too easy to let snapshots replace memory and storytelling. There's no space for legends to grow. And I don't like that about photography - photography in a journalistic sense, I mean, as opposed to mechanical photography of posed subjects, which has its uses and doesn't pose the same level of threat to myth.

Photography at its best is about capturing and telling. It is giving your eyes to someone else for a split second. It communicates some connection, some understanding incommunicable by words alone.

But cameras are everywhere now. I don't have to tell you about how there's a spot in the north of Iceland where the earth erupts into a series of jagged peaks unlike anything you've ever seen because you can see it in satellite photos or any of a million other images of the place. Myth has been reduced to snapshots.

So, I've taken to paying more attention to the magic of the time and place, to the daily fantastic. I like to ride the bus as if I'm part of a story in which anything could happen. The story that's been told since the beginning of time, that we relive constantly with different names and architecture as if it were the first time.

There was really something to shapeshifting, to seeing past people in their skin, to recognizing repeated themes in new bodies. I want stories to be dynamic again. I want to be able to wrassle with experience and misremember it until it feels right.

I think when can capture that on film, when I can see a legend in a moment, a connection between the past and the future, when magic exists again, I'll be able to pick up my camera.