Neapolitan

Even though life never stands still the still photograph captures and reveals the little fleeting moments of life, and taken into consederation what you said about the more you about the whole process, the more you know about the subject in the photograph, the less the still photograph is that one particular instance in time that was recorded on film and developed on photographic paper. The more information you have surrounding the photo the less it is an instance not frozen in time; but more a part of time. A part of time where there is a history, before and after snap shot, and also history of how and why the picture was taken. The photograph is a documentation of history, but it's very unlike other forms of documentation which records history through a segement of time. I guess a good analogy would be point:still photograph::line segment:whatever (oral tradition, book, film) but what it lacks revealing the whole event in time it makes up for in that a still photograph or painting allows person to use her imagination to elaborate on the events that happens before and after the event - like a play whose actors talk about events that happen "off screen." The painting or photograph is meant to evoke the imagination, it not meant to be a objective experience but a subjective particiption in which the artist allows you to become an artist in veiwing his art by giving you some senario in which you fill in all the other details left out of the photograph. It also does what many people wish for that is to freeze time, to let a moment linger a little longer, to capture clearer an event that would become a vague memory dulled through the passage of time.

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