Captured

If you want to capture an image, you simply take a picture of it. It takes just seconds to open the camera app, snap a photo and share it with someone. And photography can be more than just an easily accessible memory—it allows us to see things from a different perspective, capture emotions and preserve moments in time.

Wandering around the Accademia, snapping my own photos, I felt quite insignificant. Here I was, making an instant, digital copy of a moment someone else took months and years to capture centuries ago. The process of creating these massive and intricate works is unfathomable to me. As I stood before The David, it didn’t seem real that Michelangelo crafted such a precise, detailed figure from a 17 ft tall block of marble all those years ago. Even the smaller statues with empty eyes and rough edges were nothing short of extraordinary. The fingers and toes and the creases down the backs all capture a moment, a memory, a work of art.

We all walk the halls of museums, the streets of foreign cities, the trails through a forest and take pictures of the things we see. Centuries ago, there was no way to capture every sunset, pretty flower or adorable dog. The things that were captured were purposeful, intentional. Photos, museums and galleries all seek to preserve, but I find it interesting how many things people feel the need to capture in this day and age. I know I personally take too many pictures. I have thousands of photos on my phone, half of which I don’t look at anymore, but in the moment, I felt they were worth capturing.

So, standing in the Accademia, I was surrounded by hundreds of other people looking at the art through a camera phone lens. One particularly popular image to capture is of The Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. Many of the paintings depicted a scene with Mary and Jesus in the center surrounded by various other religious figures and symbols. The Accademia was filled with so many versions of this scene with different colors, positions, backgrounds and clothing. Artists created this same scene in a thousand different ways, which I think is such a beautiful feature of art.

The sculptures and paintings remind me of the differences in the worlds of the past and present, but also that people always have and always will want to capture moments in time. And though these moments are centuries old, we still find them relevant. Art is about expression and interpretation and these are crucial aspects of human life. As said by Italian street artist Exit/Enter, “life is a continuous change and an endless succession of situations, depending on your point of view, can be experienced as an exit or an entrance to new possibilities.” We all will continue to capture the moments of these changes and successions, just as we always have.