On my desktop is a landscape. It is a photo that shows a body of water, a tree trunk, a bunch of grass and flowers, and some hills. Sounds kind of blah, but what if I said this:
It is a quiet afternoon. The grassy riverbank is dotted with tiny yellow lights, surrounding the yin-and-yang torso of a birch tree. Bees busy themselves, barely breaking the silence by their buzzing about the yellow flowers. The earth gives off a scent of grass and drying pine pins. A vanishing hill primps her evergreen hair in the mirror below; the water’s surface has tiny ripples in it, fussing up the vain mountain face. If she is disappointed with this nebulous representation of her beauty, she hides it well and just goes on batting her needly eyelashes. With a toss of her bluish tresses, she holds her head high and reigns placidly above her serene landscape.
Can you feel it now? The photo was taken this last August in the Numedal valley in Norway, along the bank of the Lågen river. Whenever I look at it, I am instantly transported back to that quiet afternoon and the magic scenery surrounding my parents home in the countryside.
I am always amazed at the power of a photograph. Just the sheer fact that a small apparatus can eternalize a single moment, the exact position of a leaf of grass, the minute pattern formed by a gentle breeze breathing on water. The vibrancy of the colors, the haze of the air – it is all there in the photo. But there is more than meets the eye. Embedded in the image are sounds and smells too, you can’t see them, but the image has the power to unlock stored sensory information from the memory of a scene that far surpasses the visual representation by the photo. These sensory details add up to a feeling, a mood, and thus you can relive whole passages of life with astounding accuracy.
Photos are hooks we hang our memories on. Without them, we would still have the memories, but they would all be in a heap on the floor, crumpled and wrinkled, some buried in the bottom of a pile and accessed with difficulty. But with a photo, they are right there, pressed and starched and ready to wear. In an instant.
