In life, it is understood that our past is what shapes us as specific individuals. It’s what we reflect on in order to better prepare ourselves for new experiences. It’s what us humans use to make better sense of the world we live in. The past can be applied in a creative sense as well: examining your past work, referencing research and/or flipping/scrolling through other archives, etc. For me, the past helps me tremendously in the formulation of new creative ideas. I am on constant road trips in my head that are usually based on previous experiences.
With the present, we interact with the “real” as Tim Carpenter calls the external world in his latest book To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die: An essay with digressions. In other words, the present is when we interact with the world in any particular time frame. We unconsciously utilize our current mindsets to perceive and digest that present moment as it is unfolding. For me, that digestion often entails the making of a photograph: the action of pressing down on the shutter and choosing to document that sliver of experience within a frame. And with that action, intention is usually intertwined, breeding the hope that the particular image i just captured will live on for longer than that fleeting present moment itself.
And that’s where the future comes into play. If the documents [photos] do live on (printed photograph, book form, engrained in the mind, etc.) they then allow me to hold onto and further reflect on those specific interactions i had with the world. With the world’s limitations at that given time, i had accepted that moment for what it solely was. Nothing more, nothing less. And regardless of that acceptance, those moments are unique in their own right. Between the communication of my soul-and-mind during that moment, i felt that capturing that image needed to be done at that exact time for whatever reason. (I blame it on my intuition). This is what makes each photograph special to me; they seem to separate and blend the phases of time while simultaneously emphasizing them.
“For the photographer, there is always no tomorrow. The picture, like the poem, must be made now, else the wind and the clouds and the light—and, what’s more, the mood—will have passed on.”
–Jerry L. Thompson