A photograph can change your life. It can connect you with yourself and it can connect you with other people. It can be a way to help yourself and it can be a way to help others.

A photograph can help you to become more aware of the moment, the concept of presence and paying full attention to your present experience, not worrying about tomorrow, not dwelling on yesterday.   

A picture speaks a thousand words.

Nothing can quite match what a photograph can do unlike any other medium unlike any other experience a photograph reaches out and catches one singular moment in time and space and holds it there for us to look at. Taken within a context and sequence of infinite moments once taken a photograph extrudes out of the perpetual movement of time and stands completely for itself one single frame.

When we were looking through an old photo album or the photos buried in the files on our computer or on our phone and we see a photo of ourself or a photo of a moment that we were a part of we reflect on it. We try to recall what it was like to be in that moment. We might feel a strange form of nostalgia that is almost palpable. We might miss it and longed to be back in the moment that the photograph is captured.

But perhaps when we experience this it is not really the specific moment in the photograph that we were longing for but the moment in general. Perhaps we were longing for what the photo reminds us about right now, what the photo taunts us with, how the photo can so easily do what we want to do so badly but rarely ever can.

A photograph shows us what it’s like to exist in one frame of time, to be completely present, to be able to see all the little details in a given scene of our life, to be detached enough from ourself and the constant happenings around us, to see how things might actually be, how things could actually be.

So with this I ask, ‘What could they be right now if this moment we’re a photograph what would it be? Would you look back at it sometime in the future and miss it? Would you wish you were back here? Would you wish you could tell yourself to look around and take in all the details, to be present in it and marvel at the scene you are a part of allowing it to stand for itself?

Because with or without a photograph every moment has its singular frame and we don’t always need a photograph to feel what a photograph makes us feel.