Transient: lasting only for a short time; impermanent.
All of our moments are just that—moments. They are temporary, ending and beginning with rapidity: our minds will soon forget them. This is our medium of existence, living in each moment, anticipating the next, repeating the process endlessly.
I feel that we understand the concept that time passes, and that we will never return to certain moments; we understand that time can only move forwards, and we use phrases such as ‘carpe diem’ and ‘savor the moment’ to illustrate this. We reminisce, we yearn for the nostalgia of ‘the good old days’ (whatever those were, or whatever they will be), we attend reunions for high schools we left decades ago, and we are obsessed with the concept of vintage: tattered and weathered aviator jackets, cookbook recipes from the sixties, and polaroid cameras, to name a few.
But what I want to bring attention to, that I think we have left behind, are our moments as periods of time. There is already a campaign to ‘live in the moment’, along the same lines of ‘carpe diem’—but this is not what I am calling for. Our lives are impermanent, for now, and our memories act as our highlight reels; the time we felt the most happy, the most sad, the most nervous.
I want us to remember the smaller things, the things that made us happy for a moment, or sad for a moment, or another hard to place emotion that we won’t remember beyond that day, for our minds will deem them unimportant.
— Maya Din
Beyond this, I want us to make them worthy of our memory, as sometimes it is only the small things that can help us when there is little to look forward to. I want us to root ourselves in these moments, and draw from them when necessary. This is a call for a move towards restorative nostalgia, rather than its reflective counterpart. Rather than longing, let us move to fondness, based on the understanding that small things that occur each day are just as powerful as the larger events we hyper-fixate upon.
I understand the absurdity of using one medium to make ours less transient, seeing as how mediums themselves have evolved and have embraced their own transiency as time has gone on. The phasing out of cassettes and DVDs, alongside projectors and vinyls—although the latter two are having a resurrection right now, something that speaks to our nostalgia for a past, as I discussed earlier—illustrate this. There’s something to be said, however, for the longevity of photography as a medium. It has lasted in our society, thoroughly involved and connected, since its inception, a medium imprinted in our memory.
There was the creation of the camera, then called a heliograph, in 1816 by Joseph Niépce, then the daguerreotype created by Louis Daguerre in 1839. The first Polaroid went on the market in 1948, and the first digital camera made by Kodak was released in 1986. To this day in the 21st century, we see cameras in every part of our lives: our phones, of course; the photos in the daily news; the recent trend of digital photography on compact cameras, toted around in pockets and purses. We’ve become over-familiarized to the medium, in the same way that we have to our own lives—so much so, that to both examples, we’ve created an entire industry around this: reality television. We are flooded with photographs, and even have entire apps revolving around this: Instagram, a platform dedicated to socializing (or glamorizing, or establishing superiority) operates through snapshots of life; Pinterest, a network dedicated to reducing the individuality of a photograph, branding it as part of a larger aesthetic to be easily pinned. The photograph has lost some of what has made it unique: a look through the eye of the (camera) beholder. The medium has taken on a form of objectivity in journalism and commercial photography, and has fallen prey to the mass demands of popular culture (think trends of over-saturated photos on vsco, or the replication of poses in front of the trendy pink wall in Los Angeles). As such, I feel the use of photography as a medium of bringing our attention to smaller things is fair, bringing forth the familiar mediums in a new light, embarking on this adventure hand-in-hand.
Hito Steyerl brings up the concept of “the poor image”: an image with nonoptimal quality, one that is imperfect. That is what our photos should aim to do, with art that “...insists upon its own imperfection, is popular but not consumerist, committed without becoming bureaucratic.” The photos may not be the most aesthetic ones that we save to our Pinterest boards, but they will explore space and time within the photographic medium, broaching our own perception of the same concepts. Some will be mundane; others will take an artistic license that may have you questioning the validity of the photograph itself. After all, as Steyerl asserts: “in short: it is about reality.”
This story is in Capsule’s Spring 2024 collection.