I watched 'Born Into Brothels' last night. It won the Academy Award for best documentary last year, but I just got around to seeing it. It was engaging and inspiring. It reminded me of how effective photography is in our world. How it can change ones thinking and reminds us to see...
I am sharing with you here one of my favorite passages. I cannot read this without getting goose bumps. I guess it appeals to my passion for photography.
If you observe an ordinary object or body very closely, it is transformed into something scared. The camera can reveal secrets the naked eye or mind cannot capture; everything disappears except for the thing that is the focus of the picture. The photograph is an exercise in observation, and the result is always a stroke of luck.
The camera is a simple apparatus, even the most inept person can use it; the challenge lies in creating with it that combination of truth and beauty called art. That quest is above all spiritual. I seek truth and beauty in the transparency of an autumn leaf, in the perfect form of a seashell on the beach, in the curve of a woman’s back, in the texture of an ancient tree trunk, but also in more elusive forms of reality.
Sometimes, working with an image in my darkroom, the soul of a person appears, the emotion of an event or vital essence of some object; at that moment, gratitude explodes in my heart and I cry. I can’t help it.
‘Portrait in Sepia’ Isabel Allende
