Take a picture. Go on, take a picture of anything, I don't mind what it is. Your cat, your dresser, the window, the screen. Now, what have you just done? You've captured that specific moment in time to last long into the future (or at least until you delete it). But why? Why do we take pictures?
There's no shortage of reasons behind it, but honestly some of them are a bit trivial. And it's gotten to the point, I think, where people spend more time documenting than living. And I do like pictures, I do; I love to be able to look back and see the people I've been with and how they've grown and how places have changed. But we take pictures of things that won't be worth looking back on I don't think, or maybe of buildings we've passed or historical monuments we've seen. And that's all fine and dandy, but why on earth do we take pictures of these places that already have thousands of pictures to their name all over the place? What, to prove we were there? I don't know, perhaps I'm looking to far into it. (And of course, photography is a form of art, and I am excluding those pictures taken purely for the joy of taking pictures.)
But I was in Oxford yesterday. I'm back in England for the first time in over a decade and I got to spend the whole day in Oxford. I spent maybe seven hours there and I took absolutely no pictures. None. And thinking back on it, my rationale is that I wasn't inclined to take pictures of Oxford (and indeed most of the England I've seen so far) because I hope to not need them. I don't want a photo album to see these fields and cottages; I want to be able to look out my window and see them. I don't want to remember that I came here once because I hope to be here often. That's just me, but taking pictures of things makes me feel like I'm never going to return. I mean, what's the point of taking a photo of a building that isn't going to move or change? If no one's in the picture, you're just documenting an existence. A location that happens to be occupied by a structure. People change. People are worth documenting. Events are worth documenting. Locations are only worth documenting if you'll never see them again, or never see them in the same lighting or view or situation again.
So no, I don't take many pictures because I hope to never lose these things. Maybe that's foolish, but I hate goodbyes, and pictures are really a way to capture things we've got to say goodbye to.
