Sunday November 18th 2018

Words written, are history read. How do you take a different photograph of a group of people? Well with a camera would be an excellent starting point. However this footwear selfie narrates a story a journey, in many ways it says more than a full on face forward image would. The subject feet belong to long standing friends. Clockwise from the top, Ms Duncan, Myself, Mr Brett and finally Mr Rob. We are standing in the car park of the Nature in Art Museum, a few miles outside of Gloucester, for this was our meeting place for the day. A light luncheon has proceeded this moment, thereafter Ms Duncan had to canter off to feed her horse. So although this is an image of four people, moments later, four became three. The remaining trio headed into the fields around the Museum to observe nature. But at around 2.30 on this Sunday afternoon this moment occurred, when just four people out of the nearly 8 billion on the planet, stood together in November sunshine. 

I asked my friends to stand this way as I had in my mind the image I wished to create for the post. The briefest moment in each others lifetime, never to be repeated. A homage to a connected life connecting in a car park. Individually everything we do is known. The individual can not escape the memories of their own existence. Yet for the three other friends standing next to me, as I write this I have absolutely no idea what they are doing or where they are, or the memories they each have of childhood, life, love and so on. I know these friends well, but in reality I don't know them at all. And that's life. A physical moment transcends into a memory stored in the brain of the four of us, but each memory of how we got to this collective point will be different. 

The paradox is that even taking this image across that split second in time produces four different memories. For me it was thinking of a creative way to illustrate this record of my day which I am at present writing, a few hours later. For them? Well possibly questioning my sanity -  again! But I have no knowledge of their memory of this moment. And that is refreshing. Since their invention, photographs have provided only a split second snapshot of a coming together, not the memory in me of a day spent laughing and a later walk surrounded by hundreds of fieldfares in the weakening sun. For the casual observer in the days and years to come, it is simply an image of eight feet in a car park in sunlight taken by one of those standing there, but even that isn't known simply from the image. If I had not written this about my memory of the day, the moment and it's memory would be lost forever. Words written, are history read. Images taken are historic views.