Weekly Photo Challenge: Entrance 6

To finish this week’s challenge that is getting a little long (as i said i love Doors) i’ll look at the subject from a different perspective. Eyes are the Doors to the soul and this is my love’s eye… I shot this last year at home… Good weekend!!!

 

A trap for our soul…

When the british brought the first cameras to some tribes in africa the africans got really scared and refused to pose for the photographs. They had thought that if a camera captures your image it will also capture your soul that will be locked in it forever. That’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure if the african who said that was being literal or if that was a metaphor. If he really meant “soul” or the fact that something about him could be printed  for everyone to see and could be able to move away from his actual self forever yet still be able to show his features. I love to go to concerts and i was in an U2 concert a couple months ago. It amazed me the amount of people with cameras. I could say the audience was not watching the show but taking pictures or videos of it. Most people literally saw Bono mostly through the screen of their cyber shots. It that african witnessed that scene he would maybe realize he was totally right about that “soul cage”. My generation is using digital media to archive our passage through life and in this process we are spreading our “soul” all around in a zillion tiny pieces. Don’t get me wrong. I love photography as na art where the photographer searches for memorable examples of what is enchanting in this world and it’s impressive how effective these images can be over people’s emotions. Unfortunately the records my generation is producing is mostly mediocre. Art and inspiraton is certainly not the reason all these folks were taking shots of the event. Today if you don’t have an image to show you didn’t see it. The power of the word is less important than the power of the image. It really makes me afraid because for one to record there should be a subject and if more and more people are interested in only recording there will be less and less content. A world filled with images that have no soul.

Ghosts

When i was a kid i used to spend sometime with my grandparents. My parents used to travel abroad and they would leave us with them. I loved my grandma’s food and my grandpa’s sense of humor. There are things i never forgot like the fact my grandma used to smoke her last cigarette of the night with the lights already out. I would be sleeping on a matress close to her bed and my grandpa didn’t sleep in that room at the time. He snored too much or that’s what she used to say. I remember the red glow and the sound of burning paper. In this particular weekend my parents left me and my only sister there before a trip to Europe. They told us we would have to spend the weekend with a made because grandma and grandpa were in a farm until sunday. I remember like it was yesterday that i didn’t want to sleep in the bedroom without them in the house. I was scared so i slept on the couch at the living room. I was really early in the morning when my grandfather woke me up with his usual old italian man saying: “Wake up and spit”. I’m not sure if it makes sense to any of you. I probably turned to the other side and kept sleeping. I had just enough time to see him walking away with his beret and his clothes. I woke up with the sound of someone crying: It was my mother’s sister. She came close to me and said my grandfather was not coming back. I said she was wrong because he already arrived. I told her i saw him that morning. I remember her face when she got mad at me saying that i was lying. Saying that he died that morning on the farm. I got choked and confused and really scared at that time. Today i get happy to remember that. I’m not sure if it was a dream but if that was the case it was a big coincidence. I’m telling this story which i named “Ghosts” because that’s the only event i recall where something different happened in my life. Something i could think it has to do with spirits. I was never scared of ghosts and things like that and i think this story helped me a lot. I like to believe there are other forms of continuity after death. It would be really sad to live all we live to just to fade and loose it all forever.