Are you ready? Ok, breath all your air out....now hold it. You're dying, tick tock tick tock. Every second that goes by is one more second where you're brain is not getting that precious thing known as oxygen. Five more minutes and you're Terry Shivo. Two more after that and you're a door stop. Life is strange in the fact that the line between life and death is so thin, some people even find it hard to see.
I had a friend recently who was murdered. Life is strange. For all of the complexities that go into it, all the things that have to fit together just right for life to work and then, a man pulls a trigger. A trigger is a button if you think about it, so in essence you push a button and boom. There goes a life. Do me a favor, hit your space bar.
Click
You just killed someone. Boom.
Now what makes me bring this up? Well I don't know to tell the truth, I've had a strange couple of weeks and maybe it's the fact I've been stressing all that time and now I've realized that maybe I should chill out a bit and relax, life isn't all about that thing I've been stressing about. Life isn't to short. It's just not as defined as we think it is, not so clear cut if you get my meaning.
So what's my whole point of even writing this? To tell the truth I'm not even sure. It's a mix of hope and dark thoughts and who knows what else. When I began writing this I was slightly depressed but now I'm in a decent mood. Oh yeah I remember, slavery, that's what it was.
We're all slaves, slaves to technology, slaves to tiny trivial things in life. Sex, music, phones, facebook, all these trivial things. What do you consider to be living? As we've already discussed it's a very fine line.
Boom.
So I give this challenge to you, stop being a slave, we all are. Slave and hypocrites. Is that really life?
It's a fine line isn't it Terry Shivo?
Two minutes, 120 seconds, two ticks of the big hand on the clock. Alive....dead.
A push of the button, a space bar. Alive...dead.
Ok, you can breathe again.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Monday, February 1, 2010
Ethical question
For some of you out there it may be surprising for you to hear me say that I have dreams of becoming a war photographer. I've never been in a fight, I'm jumpy, and I have never had a strong desire to serve in the military. Anyway, that's the dream. I'm not sure why. But, that is not the main point of this post. This post is about a recent photo of mine that ran in the Daily News several days ago. I'm choosing not to post the photo for a couple of reasons. 1. It's old news and available for anyone to see on the Daily News' website. 2. The photo itself is not the main point of this post. Instead I wanted to talk about why I felt the urge to take the photo.
The photo is one of a man who had died of a heart attack and is being put into the ambulance on a gurney with a sheet covering him. Now there are several reasons I felt compelled to take the photo, mostly because I thought that it told the story, which is what photos are suppose to do. But there was another reason, this is why I mentioned the want to become a war photographer. I'd never seen a corpse before. I've seen bodies at funerals, we all have. But this, this was different. There was not the safety buffer of having the nice clothes and make-up to add color to the body. It's hard to explain but it's just a different situation. At any rate I saw this as my chance to start getting used to death, to get used to pointing my camera at the lifeless. I saw this as an opportunity to get a taste of what will be coming my way in the future. This was my Guinea pig; if I could summon up the courage to photograph this I'd have my foot in the door to photographing death in other forms. We all have our own fascination with death and destruction. Mine is that I want to have the chance to say "I've seen things you can't imagine." I don't know why but I do. Perhaps in that there is a sense of brotherhood for anyone who has seen the edge of human existence and been pulled away from it. Or maybe I'm just a damaged or "bad" person. Who knows, but that's how I looked at this. My first baby step towards my future.
The photo is one of a man who had died of a heart attack and is being put into the ambulance on a gurney with a sheet covering him. Now there are several reasons I felt compelled to take the photo, mostly because I thought that it told the story, which is what photos are suppose to do. But there was another reason, this is why I mentioned the want to become a war photographer. I'd never seen a corpse before. I've seen bodies at funerals, we all have. But this, this was different. There was not the safety buffer of having the nice clothes and make-up to add color to the body. It's hard to explain but it's just a different situation. At any rate I saw this as my chance to start getting used to death, to get used to pointing my camera at the lifeless. I saw this as an opportunity to get a taste of what will be coming my way in the future. This was my Guinea pig; if I could summon up the courage to photograph this I'd have my foot in the door to photographing death in other forms. We all have our own fascination with death and destruction. Mine is that I want to have the chance to say "I've seen things you can't imagine." I don't know why but I do. Perhaps in that there is a sense of brotherhood for anyone who has seen the edge of human existence and been pulled away from it. Or maybe I'm just a damaged or "bad" person. Who knows, but that's how I looked at this. My first baby step towards my future.
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