Impermanence

A photograph renders a moment immortal, frozen, stalled in time. It tells a story and can create a story snatched from the magic of life. Life is of course impermanent, nothing stays the same, even our own bodies are known to changeover every single cell over the course of 7 years. Nothing is permanent.

In the book ‘A world appears’ by Michael Pollan an interesting theory talks to the idea of consciousness as being a hallucination. The color red isn’t really there, it doesn’t even exist except in our minds as an interpretation of a certain wavelength of light.

Photography as a medium is an incredible thing. It’s magical that we can take the same wavelengths of light we see and turn it into an image to give a moment permanence. It it a medium that channels consciousness into something tangible. A moment of someones conscious experience bought to life so that it can be viewed now and in the future.

Before photography, conscious experience was expressed by other art forms such as painting, drama, poetry and of course the written word. Pollan describes art as a way we get a ‘sense’ of what it is like to be another person as science has limited ways to study it.

I’ve always wondered what art is. Why we need it, love it. Perhaps it is because the permanent nature of art allows us to collectively experience the hallucination of others consciousness that is otherwise by it’s very nature impermanent.

© Christian Pearson - Impermanence