It should only take one time


I'm not going to make too much of this but just into WWII, near a little village in SW France, some kids were chasing their dog into a cave or something and were crawling around. They found a narrow passage and a cavern full of art from 12-15,000 years ago. Stuff we have now seen so many times we recognize it right off the bat.  That was 79 years ago today.

Just thinking how trivial our digital cameras make us...where we make countless images that for some brief instant connect us to a person, a place, a thing....and I wonder if in the year 17,030 any of our stuff will be either around or findable....or worth finding.

Just a thought after stopping one recent morning and taking 50 pictures on my phone of one bird hunting in the marsh.  He/she was oblivious and rightly so.

When I was finishing my last degree, I had to take a half dozen art history classes as my "minor field of study".  One assignment in the architectural history class was to take the prof's Polaroid camera and, with the rule that we were allowed one and only one picture, go find the most interesting structural detail..yada yada...and explain why that photo was more important than any other candidate's shot.

Just a thought for our time.




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