My dad always said that we are not islands, we cannot go on alone in life. Someone special crossed my road and I decided to jump into the relationship life after a lot of years without it. Now she is my model. In this post, I share various experimental portrait-style photographs in a series I call "The Girl I Could Not Write". It is a phrase in one of my poems that I translated but I also think fits into the narrative of the anonymous photographs. I use this to muse my general philosophical musings below the photographs. Scroll down if you want to read my musings. For now, please enjoy the photographs.
Philosophical Musings About Being Alone
Aristotle wrote that humans are social creatures. That is, to be fully human we need to live with other humans to actualize our potential to live a good life. Even though what it is to be human is problematic and our current era's society is problematic, there still rests some truth in this statement. We depend on others so that our society functions, we depend on some people to keep the infrastructure in order, we depend on some people to make decisions that impact our everyday lives.
Shakespeare said that no man is an island. Again, disregarding the political and social problems linked to the quote, there rings some truth to it. We cannot be alone. Our minds are actively trying to get the better of us. People cannot be alone for too long. But we can translate this to love relationships as well. Our current era is characterized by a lack of lasting love relationships. Real love is very scarce. The moral implications of this aside, one cannot be alone for too long without love. Love has many different forms, and one does not need all of them. If one has real family love one does not necessarily need friendship, but everything needs balance.
Yet, one cannot rely too much on society as a whole to provide these good conditions to grow. One cannot rely too much on others to provide the love one needs to function properly. However, there is an important reciprocal relationship found here. One cannot give and not receive, one cannot receive without giving. And here is the crux of the loving society: one needs to love oneself (not in a narcissistic way) in order to receive love from others.
This is not a profound statement, but it is an interesting thought to have: society as a whole depends on the individual to have in mind the whole of society. Yet, the individual does not depend on society as a whole as such, rather the individual depends on other individuals who also do not rely on society as a whole.
The girl in my poem walked away. But someone else walked into my life. I could not write her, yet here she is. My poetry could not describe what I lacked, I only found out what I lacked when I found it. Rather contradictory.
This is the first time I took portrait-style photographs in years. I hope you enjoyed them, and if you read my musings, those as well. All of the photographs were taken with my Nikon D300 and Nikkor 50mm lens. All of the musings are my own. Happy photographing and stay safe.
