As Wide as the Icelandic Sky
Preserving our memories in an ever-increasing digital world
One of the reasons why I love photography is that you can look back on memories and capture them with a measure of tangible assuredness. You get to grab a point in time where the gods and humanity are aligned in a cosmic dance, where the skies above, the earth below, and the device held in your hand are in perfect synchronicity. Even if there’s the slightest bit of shake, jitter, or other such nonsense, the world in that fraction of a second is yours to hold on to.
I take these moments to look back between the tax preparation, video work, and project management to remind myself of a halcyon past, shrouded in the mysteries of Nature and her powers cosmic. I’m reminded that I’m small and insignificant, that to capture the full breadth of her majesty would take billions of years, and that I have only the time I’m given to imbibe responsibly in her richness.
We don’t have to use photography, of course. In a day and age where technology has been commoditized and digitized to the point of useless abstraction, we have any number of ways to record the world around us at our disposal. Our biological senses are just as valuable to tell the stories of our world as our cell phones and fingers on keyboards. We can convey the world through words, brush strokes, sound, smell, and touch.
As we move to a decoupling of personal experiences and the natural world, the urgency to find ourselves a point of reference becomes even more tangible. We run the risk of turning these sacred spaces into digital apparitions, a pale twin of reality that does a disservice to the smells of the salt air, the sounds of waves lapping against millennia-old rock, the feel of the wind tossing your hair about, and tickling your skin, and the sight of mountains arcing towards the clouded sky.
The world is agitating for a reset, for that homeostatic existence it longs for. The eruptions, the flooding, and the tectonic shifting of one landmass against another are indicators of change. At some point, our mobility may be impacted by Nature’s reset and suffering through a digitalized replica of her spaces. Until such a time as this, we also seem to be intent on flooding her beauty with the hordes of tourists and people, each clamouring for their bite of the world around, running roughshod over the grasses, fields, stones, beaches, and mountains and leaving humanity’s detritus in their wake. At some point, a reckoning needs to happen.
I said it at the beginning, but I love photography because you can look back on memories and capture them with a measure of tangible assuredness that, at one point, they were real.
With the time we have left, I’d ask you to tread carefully and intentionally. I’d suggest that you capture moments using all of your senses and wherewithal before the very fabric of what we call “reality” is replaced with a digital facsimile. Live in the world, imbibe in its moments, and create memories for yourself and others that will persist in the time allotted on this earth.
May it ever be so.
