the trips filled with love & signs.
BELLA ARGAZAM PHOTOGRAPHY
mono no aware
What moves me most are the things that disappear.
Not the lasting, monumental ones made of marble and concrete, but the things that exist only for a moment.
The look on a stranger’s face on
a train, dust rising above the road, a child’s laughter echoing off the wall of an old house, the light on
a tea seller’s face at five in the morning.
Maybe that is why I photograph the way I do.
Not to stop the world, because the world cannot be stopped.
I photograph to say: “this existed.”
I photograph to give proof of
a moment that will soon be gone anyway.
The Japanese have a beautiful expression for this: mono no aware.
The sadness of things.
A tenderness toward transience.
It is not about drama or despair.
It is about the awareness that something is beautiful precisely because it does not last forever.
Cherry blossoms are beautiful not despite the fact that they fall, but because of it.
Maybe that is why the people we meet while traveling stay with us more deeply than those who stand beside us for years.
Because we know they will soon leave.
The bus driver in Uzbekistan who offered apricots.
The woman in a turquoise scarf at the bazaar.
The man who looked only once, but in that glance there was more truth than in many conversations.
Transience gives meaning.
In a world obsessed with stopping everything, preserving it, saving it, storing it in the cloud and in folders “for later,” we are becoming less and less able to stay with something that is disappearing.
And yet life is not made of great events.
It is made of small losses.
Summer ends. Love ends.
A conversation ends.
A journey ends.
Even we ourselves end each day, becoming someone different from who we were yesterday.
And maybe that is exactly why it is worth sometimes sitting in silence and watching the world change.
Without trying to save it.
Without trying to fix it.
Without turning every moment into a project to complete.
Just watch.
How a leaf falls into the river.
How light moves across a wall.
How someone leaves.
And know that it hurts only because it was beautiful.
BELLA ARGAZAM
March, 2018
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bella@bellaargazamphoto.com