Nothing reassures me about life more than being out in
nature. Steven Price’s “Drive to Freedom” is an expression to me of the
wonderment of nature and the distractions of human intervention. His use of
electronic notes mixed with real instruments, piano and strings, fluctuate
between each other like my own life experiences of finding excitement in a
modern urban society, followed by the refreshing joy of just being in nature.
There seems to be no single way to perform this song, with so many pieces to
it, so I chose to have some of my pictures portray different views on common
places in life.
The article “Seeing” by Annie Dillard touches heavily on
learning to see things differently, or seeing things for the first time. In her
section where she quoted the findings of doctors who removed cataracts of blind
people, the reactions of those people to newfound sight are all very
interesting and quite sad at first. They just don’t know what to do with their
sight, how to attach it to things and how to use it to navigate. As one
observer pointed out, they are just as babies born with sight from that point.
It may take years to get used to it.
In a similar way, it takes anyone a while to get used to a
new way of seeing things. Something I’m
used to seeing right now is the sky, with the clouds and sun. What always makes
a view of the sky unique is if something else is visible on the side, as long as
it’s not the main feature. I show this in the Photoshopped image of the sun
with a bird to the left of it, and the real images with different buildings off
to the side of an overcast sky and a partly cloudy sky. Something else I’m used
to seeing (being in college) is being in crowds of people. A way of seeing that
which I’m not used to is seeing those crowds from a bird’s eye view, so I took
pictures of class breaks both on the ground and from a four-story balcony.
The focus then shifts away from urban society to out in the
country, where you can tell the environment has changed just from the sight of
tall, dry grass. Some of the more majestic views are out where barely any
people live, and the place I chose just outside of Spanish Fork, Utah comes
with fields, the nearby Utah Lake, and the West Mountain. The final shot I took
of my car facing right, looking down into the valley below, showcases the
rewards, as well as future possibilities, of searching for escapes from human
distractions.
"Drive to Freedom", by Steven Price: Spotify, YouTube (first song)
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