Sure, photography is an art form.
The use of black and white or sepia, and the right-upward angle at which you
snap the tiger from below the mightily rumbling rock he sleeps on can most
definitely convey a different kind of truth than seeing the beast directly from
the side in black and orange.
But snapshots of people—due to our
specie’s ceaseless obsession with others’ perceptions of us—almost never create
a higher truth; it’s more like a higher lie.
It’s a family portrait of a
husband, wife, and two kids, beaming their inhumanly white teeth at you, when
in reality, no smiles are beamed; the parents spend long nights at a law firm
and let the few moments they have at home pass by yelling at each other, and
the kids have no idea what playing with a parent means. It’s the fact that in
each of ten paintings of Mozart, he has different colored eyes.
Well, I’ve seen Facebook pictures of
a girl I know, with eyes the same color as one of those Mozart portraits, as
she beams next to the guy she loves—the guy who only wants to be friends—in a
most girlfriend-like manner. She has eyes black with ashes, but shining with that one
quavering glimmer of light that signifies her slim, impossible hope for him.
The pictures are a half-lie, a half-truth.
But no matter. Let the black-ash-spewing
volcano rage on; high school never bothered her anyway. Oh yes it did, that’s
why she needs to prove herself desirable with a filter-flooded, fakely
flamboyant Facebook photo.
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