On Photography and Living in the Present

What does it mean to live in the present? It means to embrace the present in all its entirety, absorbing its finest details through all the senses that have come alive in that particular moment.

After millions of years of evolution, humans have developed extraordinary and unparalleled skills to think about and remember the past, and brood over and construct possible futures. This was a natural requirement for the development of the kind of complex societies we live in.

Our individual thoughts, in contrast, can only be concentrated on one thing at a time. The process of thinking is like vision – you can only focus on one thing at a time, and all the rest is hazy and you can only focus on something else after you divert your focus, akin to attention, from the earlier thing.

Now, the present is there all the time, and the wheel of time picks up future events, brings them to the present, after which they slowly recede into the past.

So, we have an interesting situation where the rapid advancement of mental faculties of humans has necessitated the loss of awareness of all “present moments”. In other words, we are evolutionarily programmed to occasionally have thoughts that are not linked with that “present moment”.

Surprisingly, while our culture has so developed as to implicitly “manage” this dissonance, it does this at the cost of blindness to that very process. Take photography for instance.

Photography can be said to be the modern incarnation, a more evolved form, of painting – which is at its core a method of making copies of what we are seeing. This has parallels for the sense of sound (music CDs), the sense of taste (recipes) and so on.

It could be pointed out that painting has also given rise to disciplines like Abstract Expressionism which are far removed from anything we see and are more an expression of feelings and thoughts of the painter. But such developments are natural offshoots of attempts to capture something as rich as our interpretation of what we are seeing, and the related emotions.

Why do we take pictures? They are taken because they are meant to be seen again – either by us, or by someone else. If it was known for certain that nobody was ever going to look at a particular picture, there would be no point in capturing it. Clicking of a picture implies hope, but hope of what? The hope, that someone, someday, will look at it again.

Often, that someone is us.

We take photographs because we don’t want to lose access to something beautiful which we are seeing at that moment. We want to preserve it, so that we could experience it again whenever we wanted to. And yet, in taking a photograph, we are spending the present moment divorced from that very thing.

Consider the following sequence of thoughts.

One, life always consists of present moments.

Two, when taking a photograph, we spend the present moment in making a copy of that moment.

Three, at a “later present moment”, say a month later, we refer back to that photograph to experience that “past present moment” again.

But lo and behold! We had never experienced that scene, that moment, in the first place! So, what do we feel on seeing that photograph? Nothing at all. How many times have you looked at some picture and felt even remotely like what you had actually felt at that particular moment? Very rarely.

I think there are two principal reasons for this.

Firstly, a photograph is a two-dimensional dead representation of a moment that was actually three-dimensional and alive. It occupies only a small part of our field of view, while the actual moment was immersive and had completely filled it.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, in the digital age we tend to click pictures indiscriminately. Most of us click pictures in the Auto mode with no control over the aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings of the camera we use. This is very convenient for quickly taking snaps and we rarely give enough time to deciding the composition, the lighting conditions or considering the different angles. The result is that we just aren’t as emotionally invested in the picture as we used to be in the earlier time of films where we thought before clicking each picture as we had only thirty six clicks at our disposal.

It would be an entirely different thing if, for instance, we spent some time absorbed in a splendid view of the city from a hill situated on its outskirts, and then proceeded to take a photograph. In this case, we have lived that present moment, and the photograph will serve as a visual cue to stimulate in us the rise of the particular mix of emotions we had actually experienced at that time. But even in this case the picture won’t capture what you actually see; merely a very close resemblance of it, for nothing is fixed! The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said that we cannot step into the same river twice. Innumerable changes occur in the world each second. How can a photograph capture something we experienced a moment ago?

If I further dissect this cultural phenomenon, however, I find it to be inherently pessimistic in nature.

The capturing of a photograph is the act of “saving it”, but from what? From its destruction? But what does it mean for a “visual scene” to be destroyed?

The supposed destruction of a visual scene is nothing but our absence from that scene. For us, only the visuals that we are currently seeing are alive. The capturing of a photograph is our backup. If, on the surface, it seems merely like a method to have constant access to that view even in the future, in essence, it is the pessimistic stand that one will never experience that same thing again. While this resonates with the Heraclitean view, the reasons are very different.

Heraclitus is making a metaphysical claim about how things are. He is trying to make an objective observation. On the other hand, the photographer is taking a deeply personal stand, and is being driven by a strong emotional attachment to the visuals. The visual affects him enough that he thinks he will need it sometime in the future as well.

If we start to live in the present, we will not be so worried about the future. We will take each moment as it comes and enjoy it fully, completely dissolving ourselves in it, rather than subconsciously grieving at the loss we are going to face once we move away from that scene.

Maybe it is true that we will never see that moment again. But maybe, our future is waiting for us with a treasure chest of unique moments to be lived, a profusion of memorable moments, and maybe there are so many of them that we will never have the time to look back with regret and nostalgia.

But for that, we need to throw ourselves into the world, and be completely open and spontaneous. For someone has said that it is insanity to keep doing the same thing again and again, expecting different results.