"a blazing poetry of the real" - A. Adams

My take:

Photography. It’s art. It’s passion. It’s life. It is all these things, both figuratively and literally. Spanning the ability to be appreciable in the aspects of composition and culture, emotional through connecting people with other people, places, and ideas, and experiential by way of being a photographer, this incredible part of my life has lead me to see, feel and live differently.

It’s art. Considering the raw freedom of perspective and yet the overwhelming power of the constraints of reality, it is ultimately an expression of the beautifully mortal yet overwhelmingly tragic (interchangeable adjectives) idea of humanity.

It’s passion. Seeing is understanding. Seeing is feeling, and feeling is living. By way of eyesight or the minds eye, we can see how someone else sees things, how we see things. Emotion is simply a state of mind, unless you want to see. Unless you want to understand.

It’s life. Photography is not just using a camera to capture an image. It is living. In the most basic sense, it is experiencing life. You are there, at that moment, in that place; you feel one with that situation, that idea, that image in time and space. And what are you going to do? You are going to live; you are going to make the best of it; you are going to compose the shot; you are going to see (believe in) the beauty.

Do I take pictures? Yes, but I entirely resent that utter simplification.

Rather…

I express myself artistically, I feel and understand human emotion, and I live life looking for and seeing the beauty in every experience.

-Zack Pelz