Photography as a snapshot of the soul

Filip Stanis
Nov 1 · 2 min read

More than a hundred million photos and videos are uploaded to Instagram every day. If you started taking one photo every second non-stop from this point on, it’d take you more than 3 years to take a hundred million. And that number is just the ones shared publicly on a single platform.

Why do we like taking photos so much?

Some cultures believed — or still believe — taking a photo of someone risks stealing their soul. I think it’s the photographer’s soul that’s at risk. And that’s what’s beautiful about it.

Photo by Benjamin Combs on Unsplash

I heard people say they like to take photos to capture memories that they can reminisce about later. This may be true, but I believe it’s not the full story.

Looking at old photos makes us remember not just events and places, it makes us think of ourselves and who we were in those past moments.

Are you the same person you were when you took those photos? Do you feel the same now about what’s in the photo as you felt when you took it? What changed?

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I believe each photo we take captures a snapshot of our soul. There’s something intrinsically personal about them because of what they represented for us at the time we took them. There’s a piece of ourselves in every photo we took.

And sometimes we also take them because they look gorgeous. But that’s beside the point.

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