Views are Fleeting

There was a Teju Cole essay on photography in the NY Times magazine a couple of weeks ago. I saved this quote because it really seemed to define photography for me:

"Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs."

Given this definition, just about any photo from any contributor to the City Daily Photo blogs would do for this month's theme day: ephemeral.

This is a photo taken from my chair in our apartment. A very heavy rain is almost blocking out the buildings that usually populate this view. But is there a non-ephermeral view? Across time buildings are built, the light changes and, yes, the rain falls. The point in time matters, the point of view matters. In reviewing old pictures in this blog of our building and views from here, I came across this one showing the view when we were sleeping on a hide-a-bed couch in the living room because our bedroom wasn't furnished yet. That moment was ephemeral, too. But I couldn't have said it better than Teju Cole.

Click here to see how others have interpreted the theme.