Better Than A Photograph

Tonight I went onto Facebook and looked at one of the dear families I became friends with this summer on my European adventure. From London, a city which I know I am destined to be completely submerged, I saw that they had a website for their blog, a new addition from the last time I had checked. When reading their blog I was moved to tears of the amazing love story told in just seven paragraphs and the horror it struck me to be invited into the panic that they lived in for a few days thinking that Leslie, the young wife and new doctor, had cancer, and then later thinking that they both might have aids. I cried the whole way through; I cried to the end when the scare ended up being no more than a child saying "boo!" but I still cried. These two people had the strongest impact on me in such a short time than anyone has in a very long time. When I was in Europe, they were the only ones that made me aware that my heart still had a thump. How do they do this? HOw do they do this in only a total of a sporadic 6 days in the total of 2 months? I knew at the end of my trip that they had become dear friends of mine, but not until just now did I realize how meaningful they were to me and how much the effected and changed my life forever.

I wanted to photograph them, but schedules did not allow. I wrote in their guestbook that it didn't matter that I hadn't because I had not seen the last of them; I would photograph them the next time I came back, which would hopefully be extremely soon. Upon reading their blog all I could think is how I wish I had photographed them so that I could show whomever reads this blog their faces. But then I realized that there were plenty of times to photograph them. I saw them plenty of times, there was plenty of light, but it never felt right. I just wanted to enjoy them to see them with my eyes instead of reflected in a mirror. They were and are better than a photograph will always be and no photograph could ever capture what they mean to me.

I think at a certain point in a photographer's life it gets hard to put the camera down, but we must. If we don't, we're only photographing what we see as a photograph, not life. I encourage you to read Paul and Leslie's blog which I will put in my links. I am not the only life they have changed, I guarantee that.