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I ‘read’ photographs in much the same way I read books: daily and with an eye to every detail. Memory teachers speak of the value in ‘attaching’ images to what we want to remember. I think I’ve always ‘thought’ primarily in pictures and poems but, while they’ve helped recall many things, they’ve been no use whatsoever to my non-existent mathematical skills!
I’ll revisit today’s collection of beach photos perhaps years from now – among hundreds of such collections of the same or similar subjects, and will almost be able to ‘feel’ the flashing of neurons: conversations half heard on the bus, temperature, cloud formation, the first lines of a poem in response to flashing past the familiar outline of Arthur’s Seat, the smell of the sun-warmed salted timbers of the coastal groynes, the extent to which the presence or absence of ‘the haar’ obliterates or magnifies Inchkeith Island set in Blackness Bay, the beach café and what I chose to eat, the evening light, the lines at the bus stop, innumerable details of all that I meet.
Words and imagery are, I suppose, external representations of the inner journals of our lives. While what we think shapes today’s reality and that of our future, that thinking is itself shaped by the ‘photographs’ of every second of our lives lived to date. So I believe that time spent with ‘good’ imagery is time well spent. Perhaps you’d guessed that already? 😉📷
wind in my wheels 🌱 
I can relate to the absence of math skills!! I remember that my dad and I would make up stories about the families we imagined living in the apartment buildings and houses that we drove by – a fanciful way of making the time go by and a way to create a few giggles along the way. Your photos remind me of those times – albeit with a bit more of a grown up perspective. Each picture encouraging a memory – and watching it bloom as you recall details or moments that surrounded each frame…xx
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Nailed it, Mimi. That’s it exactly – apartments and houses: windows on others’ lives and our own, actual or metaphorical, and the light of life that shines out of them. I thought of books, art and photography that way as far back as I remember: ‘numbers’ in my early life couldn’t compete for space! – I was perpetually engaged with images. I remember that I could ‘see’ the characters my dad sang about, and ‘knew’ Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and can picture them today. Neuroscience tells us now, of course, that our human brains ‘make up’ the stories of our lives – from earliest (& to use your gorgeous word ‘fanciful’) conversations with our parents onwards. Part game, part growth momentum. We are, in truth, both fascinated and fascinating! 🤗xx
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