05/31/2023
From our photography classes in Izmir, Turkey: “Today, we started classes on portraits.
In some places and cultures, it is believed that a photo can steal one's soul.
According to deep-rooted popular beliefs, one's own image, whether reflected in a mirror, painted in a picture, or immortalized in a photograph, would be able to retain something of the subject, even to the point of imprisoning its soul.
From that moment, like the portrait of Dorian Gray, the picture begins to have its own independent life. His time no longer corresponds to our time. While the flow of our life is rapid and continues to stream incessantly, that of photography is slow and eternal. Photography holds the soul by converting the present into the past.
We change, we grow, we pass; images, on the other hand, remain motionless, like particles of a lost whole, residues of a lived and past time that has survived us.
Photographs thus remain the only keepers of memories, emotions, feelings, and fragments of life that were once ours but now no longer belong to us. The images possess those memories and allow us to relive them again.
A photograph portrays what appears and forever immortalizes a story with light. A body, posture, outward appearance, and every single furrow are words written by the emotions one has felt; they tell the life one has lived, the feeling one has kept deep inside.
Photographs reveal ourselves. A portrait is nothing but the expression of the soul”.
Grateful to .ngo and .reutlingen.ev
