foto emotive

God, I’ve spent the past hour looking through my entire iPhoto library for research for my painting class, and it made me so nostalgic. Or maybe that is not even the right word; it just filled me with emotion of every kind. I realized how much I’ve changed, how much my life has changed, how many people have come into my life and how many have left it, and that I have already experienced some things that I may never get to do again, and yet there is so much I HAVEN’T experienced... this has been very trippy. But through all of it, the overall feeling is one of really really intense happiness, like the kind where it almost makes your chest hurt cause it feels too big to fit in there. And this is all from freakin' PICTURES. SO weird.

It’s amazing how photographs, and just imagery in general, can really evoke such a full and intense reaction; from just your sense of sight you can re-create all the other senses, and almost experience what you are seeing all over again. It’s very odd – having considered myself a painter for almost ten years now, it is slightly disorienting to see how much my interest seems to be slowly turning away from painting and more towards photography. There’s something about the strong basis in reality of a photographic image that gives the medium the ability to conjure such intense emotional responses – painting obviously elicits an emotional reaction from the viewer as well, but a more abstract one, as the painted image is fabricated completely by the painter, while a photograph, no matter how retouched or altered, still has an undeniable connection to the imagery we are familiar with in real life. Come strano...