The Power of an Image

There is a tendency to glamorize a decade past, through imagination and photography. Much of our emotional imagination toward an image is created simply through the aesthetic of the medium itself. And nothing demonstrates this more than recoloured photos of far history.

The experience when gazing these photos brings us closer to the past by shifting it to the present. This shatters our false sense of glamour attributed to an old photograph, evoked through hinted nostalgia in deep monochrome. Further back still, a photograph cracked and aged arouses more imagined mysteries, which again shatters as we realise that they too were once embedded in the present, that everything looked as it does now, and felt as though it does now.

As Walt Whitman writes in 'The Song of Myself';
“My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same” - Pointing to this interconnection of beings, past and present. And later -
“The smoke of my own breath, Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn”

Whitman speaks to the rawness of being, the reality of the present through the senses in which we are all perpetually submerged. This fundamental essence of life is in you Now, as it was in the subject of a photograph once captured, now lost to the material nature of time. This sense of truth ties us to the past in an unspeakable way, through the simple and magical art of colourised pixels...

Walt Whitman, 1887