I'm tremendously concerned with the health of Planet Earth. I gave up eating poultry, beef and pork eight years ago, conserve where I can and clean with eco-friendly products. Yet as I opened the brown box I received yesterday, inside of which was a 500 page book about 20 or more women discussing the power of photography over the last 150 years, I couldn't help but be enamored by the weight of all those paper pages with all that lovely ink all over them. Although the documentary I'm working on has me practically drowning in deadlines, I took the time to sit down in my high backed reading chair and flip through the delicious pages. There within those black characters, women from the 1850s to the time of the book's publication in 1996, would whisper their impressions and illuminations (the name of the book) to me.
My guilty secret is that I ADORE the paper and the ink and I LOVE the fact I can hold the book in my lap, curl up with it by the fire and thumb through every one of its scrumptious pages. Of course I also download books, both audio and ebooks. There's absolutely no doubt it's more than a bit magical to carry thousands of books with me on my laptop and phone. But it's simply not the same. Imagine the difference in receiving an email filled with love and longing from a lover who's far away. Now imagine going to your mail box and retrieving a love letter written on real paper by the hand of that distant sweetheart of yours. Both are welcome but the second one is much better. You can feel their essence in every stroke of the pen on the paper. Yeah, it's better.
So my paper encounter started me considering the difference between paper photographs and digital ones. I take hundreds of digital photographs every month, but very few of them do I have printed. They're used as illustrations on the web or in the movies I make or I have them cataloged for "stock" images I might use in the future. I study them on my computer screen, attend to any exposure issues or other problems in Photoshop. Rarely, if ever, do I have them printed on paper or on canvas. I don't have enough wall space and, although I love hanging my images in galleries, it's not the focus of my work at this point in time.
A photograph is a representation, a copy of a real thing captured at a split second of time. It "holds" the moment for us for as long as we want to look at it. It can do that either on a computer screen or printed on a piece of paper. It seems it's time for me to come to terms with how much I treasure images and words that live on paper. Ultimately maybe that's a good thing. Certainly we have grown complacent about where paper comes from and how it's produced. We take for granted the mountains of paperbacks, newspapers and just plain junk mail moving by us everyday.
The second level of the Read Your Life Quests involves finding a particular series of your images, arranging them in an order you choose, including words - if you wish- and assembling it all into a handmade book. Opening the brown box yesterday containing my new prize (it is actually a used book but new to me!) reminded me of how much I cherish paper...maybe that's enough revelation for me in one day.
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