Ever feel like you’re some kind of stuck record?
Yes? Then good, we can be friends… because today I’ve been looking at pictures and thinking about how photography (and, er, creativity in general) can play such a fundamental part in our recovery.
It goes something like this…
I was recently sent to Coventry. Not for anything bad, I hasten to add, but for change of scenery. Oh, and some respite care from my manic Border Collie!
Whilst I was there I got chatting to Ian, who showed me his photography and took me on one of his meanders around the city.
Ian documents what he sees, with a focus on the city landscape and architecture. He explained how he sought to find, and show beauty in the details that surround him, the unexpected joys of exploring, seeking out new perspectives of his home city and learning to appreciate that seeing things differently can have a really positive impact on his wellbeing.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, don’t they?
Seeing comes before words. A child looks and recognises before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.
I did a bit of delving, and this quote (by a chap called John Berger) seems to sum up what it is about photography that so many of us find so appealing, so cathartic, so “freeing”…
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sunset. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
So there! Enjoy Ian’s photographs. And next time you’re on your way home, maybe snap some images of your city… you never know, you may start to see things differently.
Ian – thanks for sharing!
*****
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