The People In The Photograph

By the way, I don’t know any of the people in the photograph in the previous post, Velvia: Ideal For Landscapes.

And if you wondered whether the man in the Panama hat in that photograph is looking at me, you can see from this crop here below, that he is not.

I try not to act like a magnet when I am taking a candid photograph, so that people do not sense that I am including them , but I am not sure that we humans have much control over that.

I wonder sometimes how our detection of others has changed, if at all, over the millennia. The rise of individualism is not necessarily the same as the sense of being an individual, but I wonder.

In close-knit communities I can imagine that a person might be so integrated with others that the others inhabit a person like a little gathering in the person’s head pretty much all the time.

A mother thinking about her baby is an example we all recognise. In many cases the baby is pretty much there in the mother’s head all the time.

What is the force that caused us to seek to be individuals? What is the repelling force that looks for breathing space and pushes others away and makes us build an image that contains only ourselves?

And ironically, with the break-up of community we are all looking for connection.