What is a photograph if not a moment frozen in time?

Of all the art forms, photography is unique.  It is not an extension of the artists imagination, but rather a real moment captured.  The photographer can not change the reality he captures to suit his own creative expression, he can only hope to show reality through the prism of his own eye.  And so the photographer captures moment after moment in time, forever frozen just the way he saw it.

I say this in consideration of my own motivation for taking pictures.  I recently read a fascinating article on the psychology of photography.

“What drives us,” theorized psychologist Greg Feist, “is the need to capture that fleeting but eternal moment.”

“Or a wish to capture and control the things we see, to hold the beauty of the moment forever,” added psychiatrist William Reid.

Indeed, as man continues on his journey toward becoming master of the universe, we all still remain hapless victims of time.  Time marches on regardless of our own interests and we can do nothing to control it.  Like sand through our fingers, the tighter we grasp at time, the more easily it slips away.

Time is a particularly cruel tormentor to someone like me.  Constantly residing in my own thoughts, my perception of reality keeps me recalling the past or gazing towards the future, painfully unable to process the present as it rushes past me.

And so I find solace in photographs.  With the click of a shutter I come as close as I ever will to exerting control over time.  It’s why I do all of this, really.  This website is a shrine to frozen moments in time.  Images, thoughts and happenings that would otherwise be lost to the past are memorialized here.  Amongst these ghosts, somehow, I find meaning and peace.

“When pictures are being taken,” says Dimitrios Deliz, a leading photo industry analyst, ”it’s a prolonging of the moment, a justification for our being.”