A Quote by Galen Rowell

Memory selects single important images, just as the camera does. In that manner both are able to isolate the highest moments of living. — © Galen Rowell
Memory selects single important images, just as the camera does. In that manner both are able to isolate the highest moments of living.
The fact is, when men carry the same ideals in their hearts, nothing can isolate them - neither prison walls nor the sod of cemeteries. For a single memory, a single spirit, a single idea, a single conscience, a single dignity will sustain them all.
We no longer see the evolution of the nervous system, but that of a certain individual. The role of the memory is very important but... not as important as we believe. Most of the important things that we do don't depend on memory. To hear, to see, to touch, to feel happiness and pain; these are functions which are independent of memory; it is an a priori thing. Thus, for me, what memory does is to modify that a priori thing, and this it does in a very profound way.
Just having the camera, being able to pull back from situations and be an observer, it saved my life... I realised I could find these intimate moments and that people trusted me. That, basically, my camera was magic.
Images of resentment and revenge only have us spending the precious moments of our lives imagining the 'other' as both dangerous and important!
Multi-camera's fun because you have the immediacy of the audience and just being able to tell the story more or less straight through. The thing I like about single-camera is that you have the luxury of shooting a lot of different options.
To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.
To be honest, everyone thinks that a digital camera is more reliable and every single time I work on any movie, it's just as many problems, the memory card doesn't work or blah blah blah, it overheats; it's the same volume as another camera. I think people are bit taken in by it.
I can understand that memory must be selective, else it would choke on the glut of experience. What I cannot understand is why it selects what it does.
The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. When the photographer selects this movement, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is and so recorded. It must take its proper but no less important place as a shape and a texture in relationship to the mountain tree or what not, which are included.
The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.
I think the camera was always my obsession, the camera movements. Because for me it's the most important thing in the move, the camera, because without the camera, film is just a stage or television - nothing.
Some people say they use images to help them remember intricacies. Others say they just remember. If they are able to form an image of the face, it is because they remember how it was: it is not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things.
I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!
Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it's better to do both.
I take the really sad moments with me to the court. I'm able to transform all that energy, and from it create strength, faith, and a will to honor everything I've gone through. I use the memory of those painful moments as a weapon to keep fighting.
We all do role-play. Sometimes behind the camera, and sometimes in front of it. I am the few lucky ones who have been able to wear both hats and especially have been able to romance the camera in a believable way, and I hope that this romance between us never ends.
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