Capturing the moment

Photographs are very powerful things. I was looking through some old photographs this week, from my youth group days. An old friend was good enough to scan them and post them up to Facebook so we could all share the memories. I still remember the teenagers I spent time with, as they were then, frozen in time. I have lost touch with many of them, and I probably wouldn't recognise some of them now, but my memories of them then, as they looked then, evoke all sorts of emotions. The picture of me on the left was taken around 1980 (from another photo collection), capturing a personal moment in time for me. I wonder what happened to that old combat jacket?

When I trained as a photographer back in the early 70s, everything was done manually, in a dark room, with developing and fixing tanks, enlargers and various grades of printing paper. Photography took time. We had to learn all about lens apertures, parallax errors, film speeds and polarising filters. With the introduction and rapid take up of digital photography, a lot has changed. Photography is now more or less instant. It is now so much easier to create, edit, and share images over social media. Sites such as Picasa, Flickr and Facebook are full of shared images, many that have been posted to the web within seconds of being taken. The social web is an instantaneous, rich and fertile environment for sharing memories, capturing moments in time and preserving them for ever. Even the British Monarchy has this week widened its digital footprint by publishing a number of previously unseen images on its new British Monarchy Flickr site.

Never before have we been able to make the statement - this is me! - in such an emphatic and meaningful manner. Digital photography, when linked with social media, can offer endless opportunities for people to engage with each other. The discussion over the old photos of my youth group posted on Facebook last week has prompted a flurry of comments, tagging and sharing from us all - and although many of us had lost touch with each other - the images have brought us back together again, wherever we are in the world. That is priceless.

There is an undeniably emotional - and even spiritual - dimension to this kind of shared imagery. Capturing moments in time that will never be again. Sharing them, and talking about 'the old times' is not just about nostalgia, and remembering a time that once was. It's also about celebrating the 'here and now', marking the event, because it will quickly be gone. It is about recognising that although time is a constantly onward moving stream, we are able to share our common thoughts, emotions, hopes and aspirations as we encounter each other within it.

'You cannot step into the same river twice' - Heraclitus

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