Stopping Time, if Only for a Second

Welcome everyone to my first blog! With that being said, I’ll keep the introduction short since you can read more about me on Amazon, Goodreads, Facebook, etc. and I’ll add more as we go along, so, for now, we’ll get this first blog started. I love photography! I have been a photo hobbyist for many years and always using outdated cameras and technology, I love photography and preserving history by taking photographs of historic areas. I love to travel to old buildings and one love of mine is ghost towns. There is nothing more relaxing and historically satisfying than walking around an abandoned and desolate area where life once thrived but now, nothing except silence. Walking down the dusty street where buildings now decay in ruin, I wonder what happened in that area one hundred years prior and who was there, who walked where I was and can only imagine by reading books and historical texts of the area. Another way to not only learn history and the past but see history is by photography. For just a slight second, less than one second, history is frozen and captured in a screen – either on film or digitally. Not only are you freezing that image but you’re stopping time and holding history. Whether the photograph will be held in your family for one or more generations until the images and figures in the photographs become unknown and forgotten about or used for historical purposes, stopping time can preserve so much. When I look at photographs of a ghost town through the town’s birth until its demise at the present time, there are and have been many visitors to the land who took pictures and shared them and near the ruin where I walk, I can look at the photographs that were taken through the past century and not only realize the sadness of forgotten memories dispersing in the gentle breeze on a hot day, but see the deterioration of such a town and the town’s history. Once people left the town and those people have passed on in their own gentle breeze through memories of others, their lives became forgotten just as the town’s history if it wasn’t for historical texts but also, historical imagery – photographs. Take as many photographs as possible because who knows how much longer the wood slats will be held on top of the frame of the rotting wood building until eventual collapse and the building is gone forever. Who knows how much longer the trees will be free to release green imagery and clean oxygen before a parking lot is paved or even, how much longer that special person will be able to have their image taken in order to preserve their life for future generations and people to see them once more. Freeze that image, stop time, and preserve history by stopping time, if only for a second. Please check out some of my historical photography on www.benjaminmollenhour.weebly.com