Living Life By The Lens by Austin “ACE” Harrison
Self Portrait by Austin Harrison
Living Life By The Lens
It’s been 6 years of chasing views from the safety of my viewfinder. Moments flash, flashes snap, and snapshots captured capture human moments, minds, and hearts; for this has been my life work.
Life work I do not wish to conflate with Life’s Work. My Life’s Work is still yet becoming. However “Life work”, work that produces fruits of the spirit to be consumed and delighted in by all who come sit at the table, must be tended to as a garden for the yearly harvest to persist.
It’s hard to make sense of any one moment, shoot, or scene in my collection as definitive of me, my voice, or my point of view. Rather, I use the images as raw material to collage the angst which surrounds me as I snap snap away.
Why angst? Because I can’t quite say the things this society has stolen from us. Nor can I put into words the brilliance behind the burning eyes of our nation’s forgotten resilient.
Our forgotten resilient have learned to observe through stinging eyes. When you ground and raize highways in an effort to blur the blight as you cruise into the inner harbor; there we were watching your white sails float overhead on by. Something in this unrealized, preferrably forgotten, perception unsettles the strong men of this country to their core. (Arguably as much now as when Fredrick Douglass made the parallel 180 years ago).
One of the worst things you can do, is pick a fight with a person with nothing to lose. The scales will never balance, for the one who fights to protect what he has must split his focus in two. Partially for the battle at hand, and in the recesses a fear of what should befell his fortunes upon the slightest misstep.
Let Sun Tzu tell it, this is too costly a division in the art of war. The split mindedness brings upon hesitation, then doubt, then incongruence in speech, followed by eventual folly in action.
The forgotten resilient have seen this all, and unlike those great captains of the sail boats in the sky, the forgotten resilient remember the lessons of our shared pasts, especially those passages steeped in troubled waters. In case any of you are intrigued about the current conditions which run underneath the surface of our old bay; take a walk with me.
By: A.P.
Photo by Austin Harrison
