Like finding money in your pockets

A local restaurant group contacted us recently about buying prints of photographs we had taken on our various trips abroad, so I located a disk of unedited work that I had done while in Berlin last fall on an assignment. As I began looking through these images, I found photographs that were taken on a day dedicated to seeing Berlin. While wandering around the Brandenburg Gate, I discovered the newly-completed Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The site had literally popped up from nowhere, because I had been there not twenty months earlier and the space was a parking lot.

Monuments to remember those who died in the Holocaust, which are all over Germany, always put me into a daze. The magnitude of what they represent is overwhelming to the point that it is difficult to feel anything. My reactions to them are always delayed; they impact me days and weeks later in more powerful ways than the original experience ever did.

I was excited to see this image on the DVD, because I frankly didn't remember making it while I was there. It was like finding money in the pocket of a pair of pants that you haven't worn in months. Yet, moments later, looking more closely at the woman in the photograph, I found myself sitting at my desk staring at it, my hand subconsciously placed over my mouth (just as she did), as I re-experienced the architecture of that monument in Berlin.

What I love about photography is that it can allow a viewer to experience and re-experience a seemingly insignificant and fleeting moment in time. And make it powerful.