The Challenge : “Vanishing Point”
A new month heralds the arrival of a new challenge and for March the challenge is to photograph ‘Vanishing Point’. I was excited to see this subject, after all who doesn’t like a graphic image with leading lines. It started me thinking about how I’ve wanted to shoot the underside of a pier for years but I just haven’t made time for it and unfortunately I don’t have a handy pier in my lockdown area, so I guess that will have to wait for a while longer.
Instead it started me thinking about what it means to vanish. Maybe it’s about not being seen, maybe about not having a voice, something often expressed by those senior members of our society who get bypassed as life races away chasing youth. I recalled a picture I had taken some years back of a homeless person in the shadows, unseen by those who walked by. I thought about lockdown too, forcing us to hide from the world.
I moved on to think about the sense of emptiness after something has vanished, a space left behind, maybe a sense of loss, maybe of bereavement but then, we’re still so connected to those who have passed away. So maybe death isn’t the vanishing point, maybe it takes much longer for any of us to really depart, for our influence to ebb away, for the world to move on, for the memories to fade?