Your Very Own Time Machine

Hello all. I read this morning a very interesting article about how reading history, written prior to all the wokista redaction and rewriting is a superb method of understanding the past and appreciating what happened and how it influenced where we are today.

I concur, but would propose extending that proposition to those of us who practice the crafts of photography and videography.

A photograph or video is as we all understand, a capture of a moment or short period in time. I am not referring to cinema video of course as that is contrived by design, but the video that we may make on the cameras that we use to make still images.

These moments in time are freezes of what is then and what was to us in the future. We need only take time to invest in seeing the photographs of Dorothea Lange from the Farm Services Administration during the Great Depression, to be able to travel back in time and “be” if only for a few minutes then and there.

My friend Judy has really embraced drone video. She does a lot of seashore type of stuff that when she couples with music is relaxing and beautiful. It’s also a time machine for how the shoreline was when she made the video.

Anyone who lives near a shoreline or who has visited sites of shoreline erosion such as the Hopewell Rocks in Canada’s New Brunswick province can get a real sense of stepping back in time to what once was.

Indeed landscapes and particularly those including geological subject matter are wonderful time machines, but so to are photographs of people, family, friends, homes and the like.

In an interview, the Duffer brothers, creators of the, in my opinion, generally excellent show Stranger Things, emphasized how hard their set teams worked to create sets that evoked the nineteen eighties and the costume team also had to work to find or recreate clothing from the period.

We sometimes will look back on old photos of ourselves, family and friends and ask ourselves what we were thinking, but at the time, it was what it was and those photos are visual time machines to that period. Sadly, such images are often unappreciated for this capability until long after the time has past.

I find automotive design to be another kind of time machine, from the large rounded edges of the nineteen forties to the space faring look of the late nineteen fifties to later less attractive designs as strong indicators of the conscious of the period.

My point is not to forget to use your time machine on a regular basis to capture and store such things for historical reference and for future generations. An image or video made well today will maintain its strength decades from now.

Until we meet again, thanks for reading and my best to you all.