The Power of One Photo
Sharing a slice of time can bring hope to the world
The most incredible power of a story is its perception. It was early morning on January 2020, shortly before the pandemic wrapped itself around the world, when I began to jot down a thought into words.
At the center of everything we experience is a story. Stories are always evolving. The only beginning and end to a story is the one that is told or the one we perceive.
After I wrote and read it, I published it in a Tweet. It got a good amount of likes and I pinned it. Later, I added it to my bio on my websites.
It really defines my thinking about storytelling.
I’ve always perceived people as humans with feelings, emotions, thoughts and dreams. I think our differences are only due to our situation, our location at a given time, and our community. I traveled a whole lot during my life and I had the privilege of meeting many people of all ages of “all walks of life,” as they call it.
They shared their stories with me and always had this sparkle in their eyes and in their voice. Even in their gestures. Some of it was invisible like magic. There was a vibrancy about them.
When I got my very first camera, I don’t remember what it looked like. It took many years for me to realize why I didn’t.
I spent hours looking through the lens.
It was an escape from my reality into discovery and imagination. The camera was for photos but I treated it like I was inside a movie. I remember walking by myself around my neighborhood. Oh, that was a story itself. I was six or seven in a small neighborhood in the outskirts of an Andalusian town in the coast of Spain. There was a cemetery and a train stop and beyond a field an empty beach.
I enjoyed sifting through photos my father took, as the photographer he was. And at the school library, while my friends were into the books with cartoons, I looked for books with photographs. I had plenty comic books and books with illustrations at home.
I watched my father climb up things to get a “good shot” of something. I watched him move from one side to take a photo and then walk to another side to shoot the same thing. Sometimes squatting on the ground, too. I was too young to know what all of it was. But I picked up on it as I could relate to it while looking through the lens of my own camera.
The difference between a story told in a film and one told in one frame is how we perceive it.
We all need an escape sometimes. We want to submerge our whole selves into another space. Another world. Not everyone has a great imagination to go to when they are alone after a long day. If we all did, none of us would watch a movie or read a book. But sometimes, we all need a break from our own head. Even our imagination.
Film fulfills that need. Watching a feature film is a one to three hour trip into another world. We trust to travel inside someone else’s imagination.
You’d think with one frame, one photo, one shot…you’d believe that the escape would not last as long as a movie. But a photograph can take you to a part of your imagination you could not access on your own.
I’ve stared into a photograph for well over a half hour before. Crazy, right?
Sometimes I get lost inside my own space just staring into a photo. A photo can tell a story. But it’s how we perceive that image that tells the story. There’s a difference between the story the person taking the photo perceives, and the person who looks at the picture perceives. It’s a bit like when people look at art in a museum.
There’s a difference between a film, a book, and a photo as well. They each bring us outside, or deeper inside, our minds.
They can show us things, places, feelings, and can help us empathize with others. If we allow ourselves to embrace it, we may even change a bit about how we normally think about the world we live in. We perceive the world according to our surroundings, our present time, our community, and most importantly, our dreams.
To dream is to feel hope. Hope keeps us going each and every day. Hope is the food and the energy that feeds our existence. It’s incredible, isn’t it?
We can give hope to an entire world, simply by taking a photo and sharing it. Allowing others to perceive their own stories from one small and tiny capture of time that can last forever.
This year, the International Mobile Film Festival in San Diego has created a photo contest. One story with one frame. Shot with a smartphone camera. Any brand. We will share your photo with our attendees in April 2023 and we’ll make a big deal of your accomplishment.
