What is the Face that is the Real Face?

Photographers are very good at this.

We capture moments and then ‘sell’ them as the ultimate moment. The sliver of time where we make a curated selection out of our multiple snaps and present the chiseled-in-stone-only-rendition.

This is similar when we look in a mirror and really look at ourselves. We snap away at every scrunch and smirk and smile. Then settle on the picture where we make our lips an ‘0’ because that’s the best wrinkle-away gaze.

Photographers can’t help but take picture after picture until we decide we get to the one that is in our opinion, right.

Yet there are times.

Times where we give into our self gaze, study the eyes, delve deep into the levels of the dark and the light; don’t change a thing or snap another picture even if the one we are left with is layered with unwanted— more likely— unlocked for revelations.

But most of the time we bend time to make it look like what is in our minds.

I know I have been doing plenty of this. Taking picture after picture after picture and then settling on some that say what I want.

And also recently I’ve been, let’s say, destroying my photos and reimagining them in collages. Which leads me to the self.

And how I am like every single photograph I’ve ever taken and I am also always trying reinvention. (There are many who believe I need an intervention).

The art of photography is a beautiful thing. It’s the only craft where we can take a likeness of what is, paint on it to what is in our heads, and if we don’t like that, tear it to pieces and make it fit into something that just wasn’t ever is but is now exactly what we have decided what it should be.

Last night I couldn’t sleep. It’s a pattern that lately repeats. I can’t sleep because I don’t know what I am; an exact copy of who I was? A scene colored after the capture to match how feelings look? Jumble it all up to make a new this-isn’t-me but it sure could be?

And to think in this time I wonder why I am morosely single.

Taking photos for no other reason but for the pleasure of capturing a moment is very complicated, yet effervescent. A photographer is in control; even the Heavens and Earth, and all God’s creatures are at the mercy of what we decide to frame. What we decide to do with those elements.

Using the in-camera triangle to achieve the best photographic captive. Then afterwards with digital maneuvering. We break apart the known world with our own living breathing planet of possibilities.

Nothing is never what it was, or it was. But only for a sliver of time one has to wonder if it was. Or just what it would become.

Like the smile or the smirk or the sad eyes that look back at us in the mirror. What is the real moment?

I think I know after rereading this several times, massaging its loop-de-loops to a more cognizant pattern:

The camera is a face we chose to hold before our faces. To face the miracle we have. To make time stop. And then we take what we have, either the images or the memories.

Shape them with our personhood; all 9 billion plus of our identities.

For many of us that shape which reveals itself. Is a Hallmark card heart. The symbol everyone recognizes. And gets to with the individuality that makes the pursuit identical.