Photography: For the Love of Beauty

Gently stabilizing my camera for another perfect shot, the question that has bugged me since I purchased my camera ran through my head once more: why do we photograph? While in Hong Kong, a city where everyone sports the latest DSLR cameras, the question became more pertinent then ever.

After reflecting upon this question for sometime, it hit me: we photograph for the love of beauty. Now this may sound like a lofty statement, but hear me out. I could never quite understand why I would at times be a frantic photographer when experiencing a new scenery, such as the exotic south of China. During my trip to the south, I felt my excessive photography was hindering my enjoyment of this truly beautiful part of the world. Then I realized that I was in a hurry to photograph what I could because I wanted to own this part of the world. I wanted a token of memory, a souvenir, to remind me that I was in this part of the world and it truly moved me. My photograph is evidence that I loved the scenery's beauty and thus, with the click of a shutter, I claimed ownership to the beauty it entailed.

I guess my hurry to photograph all that I could was a result of the anxiety of potentially losing this beauty that was before my eyes, that I could potentially never in my life see again. Moreover, this photograph would be a stark reminder that if I truly hoped to possess this beauty, then I would have to work hard to own it, by potentially returning to it. Although photography in of itself is a superficial activity that doesn't one to truly understand the history and story behind a scenery, it is late at night, in one of my nostalgic moments, when flipping through my photos, that I scrutinize my photos, research the story behind them, interpret them in my thoughts and writing, that I come to truly embrace the beauty of my photography (i.e. beauty in the eyes of the beholder, of course).

A famous artist and photography, John Ruskin, was once quoted for saying "Photography taken by this vivid sunlight are glorious things. It is very nearly the same thing as carrying off a palace by itself-every chip of stone and stain is there." It is in this very spirit that we can carry back a monument or relic that we can come to own, appreciate, and love its beauty through our own eyes, which is captured through the lens of a camera.

Even the emperors of the palaces that we visit may never witness, or even conceive, of the beauty that we might capture through our photography. Who knows if the sun will ever decline again in that angle from which you capture it. Will conditions permit that we every witness beauty at its prime again. What if there's no tomorrow? Its is through photography that we can freeze time and take a snapshot of a fraction of time that the cosmos may never bring around again.

As Gene McSweeney would say in Grey Water Photography:

"We try to grab pieces of our lives as they speed pas us. Photographs freeze those pieces and help us remember how we were."