“Insert life-affirming quote here” © Julie Corcoran.
This week I have been mostly capturing dew laden webs with my dark chamber, otherwise known as a camera. As my lens focused and froze a moment in time forever, I thought, there’s something missing.
When I got home and loaded the images onto my computer, I knew there was something missing. But what was it?
The spider, I hear you mumble to yourself, no, not the spider.
What my picture lacked was not exposure or shutter speed (well perhaps, I’m only learning); but a life affirming text. My photograph needed a quote.
I also like the other reason on wikipedia, for using quotes, “to make the user of the quotation seem well read”.
It was only natural that our obsessions with popular images in poster form during the eighties would evolve with the growing popularity of the internet. Most teenagers would disbelieve you now if you told them there was a shop (Athena) in the St. Stephen’s Green centre that only sold posters. The enormous popularity of the image of a man holding a baby (L’enfant) or the dangling kitten telling you to ‘hang in there’ would be lost on them.
But now we have the internet! An endless supply of quotations to makes us feel clever and good about ourselves. However, clever quotations from knowledgeable dead people is, it appears, a finite resource. A perusal of quotes on pinterest would lead you to believe we’ve begun to scrap the bottom of the barrel. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with the message, it’s just not packaged as a traditional quote; short, snappy and to the point.
More a novella, than a quote. Found on http://www.pinterest.com
Don’t get me wrong, I love quotes. I especially love quotes scribed across a nice photo of a landscape; I have made plenty of my own in the past. But should I succumb and type one across my spider web, or just leave it as it is, and let you come up with your own life affirming thoughts.
na rudai ata i mo cheann 