Rationale

I hope that curiosity never dies.

A man born into this world stands before it naked, his bare feet rub the dust of the earth. His muscles. His brain. Everything that is the being of this man and the ideas he may spark out, are all fuck-you in Time's face. A fight to grapple anything that merits the word of obstacle. His enemy is Time. It is always Time. Conversely, it is because of Time that this being is beautiful. Time arms him, because it will in the end kill him; it makes his actions relevant; his thought humane and his efforts glorious. Time gifts him with impetus for action. Time makes the moments he gives his energy to memorable and relevant. The time he spends with lovers meaningful and the sex he has hot. Time is an invitation to be curious; to explore; dare, challenge, learn and love.

Technology is the manifestation of a man's battle with Time. Technology is man's arsenal. Technology makes Time bleed, suffer and momentarily crippled so that a man may be allowed free time. Every thought, every idea is done with a goal to steal life from Time. Every thought ever thought contains within itself a compression of its parent thoughts. Each step in the ladder of evolution could be compression of thought. With each unique idea containing the explosive fuel of the idea before it, to give birth to something new. The man is driven to invention by the feeling of being mortal. It drives him. The feeling of Time makes him hungry and reckless. Being mortal means being beautiful. He is beautiful because he uses up his time to healthy and hungry resolve. This shows in his body. His body becomes his transport, his factory and his weapon. He makes use of it to the best of his ability. His body is a manifestation of purpose because without the icy grip of mortality his brave heart would be doomed to a life of stagnation.

Within every action there seems to lie within itself a contradiction: Rest cannot exist without motion. For something cannot rest unless it is moving. Something cannot suffocate if it is not breathing. In life is death because something cannot live unless it dies. Rest cannot exist on its own. Something cannot die unless it is alive. Something cannot be mysterious unless it is understood. The more things become understood the less mysterious they are.

The beauty of somebody or the beauty of a situation is my favorite thing to photograph because of what it represents–a purpose. Beauty can manifest itself in vastly different ways and more importantly at vastly different times. Situations are worlds. Artists are prophets, lighting up what we think the future should look like. The art is neither in the past nor the present, but always in the future. The photographs you see are a world. The world they depict speaks of hopes and fears. Of the death of curiosity and the reckless disregard of convenience, of feeling alive again. Smoke is creation, freedom and fire. The characters are youth, the sinewy and strong form of action. Their faces show an incomplete comprehension of Time. A world in which Time hasn't touched yet.

Photographs are relevant because without perhaps a full comprehension of it, I know without a doubt that one day I will die by Time (or by consequence). I want to treasure the moment for it has certain properties that will, one day, liberate my conscience from any youthful regrets. That will survive to inform me later what I felt. That will stand testament to the threat of my mortality. Digital photography is a quantification of reality. Each pixel and color is measured, each level of contrast gauged and every lumen of light described and translated into a number. The digital photograph is immortal. It can always be reproduced or be altered with ease. It is everlasting and represents a certain culmination of technology that has won a battle against Time. Time cannot destroy or decay a digital photograph. The color of the sky is not a digital representation value of RGB blue. It is cold and crystal and ice polished clean by cotton clouds in South Africa. Nothing can quantify or explain how I feel about the sky in a photograph. The manifestation of its color hits me and tells me of the universe, of freedom, of stories, of flight, magic and stars and light. An attempt to explain blue is bullshit when I open the image in Photoshop and inspect its RGB values. R:5 G:5: B:201. Nothing can explain this blue. It is only explainable by itself. Film is reverence. Digital is wild and uncontrollable. To doubt the medium means to lose reverence for it. To kill my curiosity of it. This, I believe is the problem with digital photography. Digital is sufficient if we remind outselves why photographs are taken and thus don't lose that reverence.. It is the doubt of authenticity that injures the reverence we once had for the color blue. Film becomes a luxury because the silver elements are cemented into the gelatin by the bittersweet juice of mortality. An image represented on film decays day by day and represents a life mortal. Time will tear it apart, one day and cause it to come crashing down into a million shiny silver memories at the end of its life.

Daniel van Flymen