CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/14/2016

Seeing Things

"I have been in love with this photograph ever since I first saw it," Joel Meyerowitz writes in his wonderful new childrens' guide to looking at photographs. Under the category heading "Looking Into the Future," the 1947 photograph by Édouard Boubat captures a young girl, Lella, traveling through the French countryside in the back of a truck. "We don't know what she is looking at or where she is going. But it doesn't matter, because this picture is about Lella looking forward into the future… Her gaze becomes a symbol, a metaphor for change and the ongoing passage of time. Every second we experience disappears as we live it. Right now is slipping away into the past as you move forward. But a photograph stops time and preserves fleeting beauty, such as Lella's, lifting it into something meaningful beyond the moment, into something timeless."