I was recently invited by my friend and fellow photographer Diane Apabo to pen a column on the importance of photography, and how technology has evolved the art. The following is what was published in the latest issue of her Suspend magazine:
“Images are a portal … a gate way to the places and emotions captured in a single moment by a photographer.
Images are, much like music, a universal form of communication. A boy smiling in his mother’s arms means the same thing to a nurse in Brooklyn, New York as it does to a farmer in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It is this sort of connectedness that first drew me to the art of photography … the ability to take a world so vast and compartmentalize it into a single frame.
Technology has provided us with the incredible gift of being able to share these moments with others with a level of immediacy unknown before the turn of the 21st century. I can photograph an ailing man praying for aid outside Pražský hrad in Prague, and an hour later, share that image with thousands of people on Facebook or Instagram; people who for some reason feel connected to it.
Or provide an intimate look inside the home of a Cuban family … an adventure in voyeurism not granted with frequency. How often are we allowed inside the homes of others, let alone that of a family in Havana struggling to make end meets with a pregnant teenage daughter, absent father and bustling mother?
In our personal lives, images can be transportational; reminding us of what love looked liked, felt like … in the days, weeks or years before it’s ending.
Technology affords us the ability to record these moments, and to have them so that in hours of doubt we can remember our greatness, remember our origins, and remember what’s possible. It’s through photography and technology that the universal human condition is realized.”
