What the Shutter Can't Possibly Capture

It should be illegal to photograph a stream. Remnant in the photo is simply the image of water. It could be a rain-filled pothole in the street for all we know. It could be a backed up storm sewer or a mosquito puddle collected in a low place in the yard. Streams, after all, have movement, and sound. Streams are ever changing -- a leaf carried here; a bug landing there; a pebble pushed along the sandy bottom. Who would know from the photograph that any of these wonders is true? Who would be able to follow the course of it all over the rocks and down the valley to some presumed river further along? Who would be able to hum along with the gurgles and the rhythmic splashes as the currents traveled and then spilled and ultimately regrouped below for the next tumbling round? Streams are constantly moving, constantly changing, and a photo imposes an artificial frame and then freezes it, as though it finally represented anything.

But then everything is moving. A bowl of fruit captured as still life is similarly transient, albeit invisible to the naked eye. It doesn't dribble and splash and mist and run, but it mushes and wrinkles and rots and ultimately falls in upon itself. The autumn pumpkins that decorated our front steps that still robustly color the photos we took are now flattened and browned by the snowy winter and caved in and over onto the flowerbed below. Still life, indeed. And that portrait of our wedding a scant 10 years ago -- who are those two? If they are the same ones who today occupy the house where their mail is delivered one could hardly claim they have stayed "the same." Everything is moving.

Which is perhaps to say if we intend to go on taking pictures -- and in truth I could hardly give it up -- we would do well to discern behind the photographic image...
...the running trickle
...the gurgling chatter
...the inexhorably moving force which is the very pulse of life --
implicitly and woefully inadequately represented there.

Which is to say that photos must be viewed more with the soul than with the eyes. In fact, it wouldn't hurt to view most things that way -- whether we get around to taking their picture or not.