Enter the Void

I wish I had some profound thought to go along with this photo, but I don’t.

In fact, I find that the more amazing some of my photos turn out, the more disillusioned it leaves me.

This photo is, something like, 500 photos. It’s a snapshot of four or five hours. It’s a result of three days in the woods, one frigid cold night, and several hours of editing with multiple different programs. And those three days and nights in the woods and multiple programs are the result massive amounts of engineering; the cars we took, the gear we used, the clothes we wore, the cameras we used, the code to write the programs, the computers we ran the programs on. And that technology is the result of thousands of years of study and experimentation and creation. Hundreds of thousands of years of human curiosity and exploration.

And Exploitation.

The environmental damage done to dig up the resources for, not just today’s technology, but all the technology of the past that led up to what we have now. The environmental damage that will remain years after me, my camera, and this photo fade from existence. The human element of that destruction: lives, languages, cultures that were sacrificed in the name of technological advancement. The sliver of a chance that all of my forebears survived those sacrifices so that I could be here taking this photo and thinking about all it took to be here.

My friend described this photo as “powerful.” I agree, on many levels. I don’t think it’s good or bad, I just think it’s such a wildly random chance that I’m here.