On the Art of Fixing a Shadow

When you create a work of art, or anything that you would consider art, it is immediately copywrited. A legal fingerprint is left on everything that you make. The moment the shutter closes, you own that image. Once your ideas are drying ink, the order of those words is your possession, exclusive to your care and whim.

This is at once a glorious legal freedom and an ideological disaster.

Owning an idea.
To have images and sounds reduced to property. Embracing the right to hoard experience and expression like a miser.
Taking the most ethereal and self-exploratory of all human endeavors and binding it with capitalistic chains of ownership.

To commoditize and privatize art is to drain the value and dignity from philosophy.

And still I say "I want".
I want that tree.
I want those shadows.
The color, the texture. The dance of shapes and the choreography of natural chaos.

I want them! I say it in my head each time I'm about to shoot. The words come so effortlessly they must be true. I'm not sure what they mean, though.

It may be that I wish those wonderful things to be nobody else's.
I desire their splendor for myself, to be kept away from others unless I deem them worthy.

Unless they see what I see.

I will transform the chaos into what the colors and shapes have become in my mind's eye. They will no longer be part of the world, part of everyone. They will be mine, because nobody but me will ever see them in this way. My perspective is wholly unique and the expression, the representations of that uniqueness, belongs to me. It is my property.

Or it may be that that perspective is so fleeting, so untouchable, that I will never see it again. I want to hold onto it desperately because it reminds me why I live. It reminds me of every privilege. It is impossible and invisible and it is there.
Nobody will ever be able to provide me with it and I will never be able to rediscover it.

As I experience it, it is fading.
When i leave, it will be gone.
I don't want that to happen.
I want to retain it. I want to share it.
I want to remember that shape and feeling. I want to experience it again.

I want it.
If the silver nitrate is a wiling accomplice, maybe I will have it. Maybe I won't have to let it go.

I can take the shadows with me, and the feelings, the perspective, will be in my possession.