This photo is participating in the contest with the theme "REAL" at [link]

An extremely interesting and original theme, but also frighteningly subjective and difficult to define... perhaps that's why it caught my attention so much...


Even considering a photo as one of the most beautiful captures of the "real" of a single moment, that would just be it... MY "real" of that single moment, entwined with the "real" of the camera and the "real" of the viewer, turning something that should be intimate and unique into a sharing experience, into a system of REALITY, where a feeling is never repeated, but communion always exists...


As so, trying to transcend everyday's crude and false reality, I tried to capture a single image where most of my actual real(ity) existed in a symbolical way. Unavoidably... an image of nature....


...... And so I reach this forest near my hometown, where the devastatation of last year's summer fires still draws a tear from the villagers who always lived from it...

I approach one of the trees and ask: why? No answer, only the wind tries to say something I don't understand.

I get really close to her and look up...

...Feeling very very small, I sense the pressure of the world in the air, trying to collapse my interior expressions of freedom, the ones which always kept me alive... Right in front of me, this wise tree, with decades of experiences and visual delights, proud of germinating its branches and nurturing its leaves, now completely burned and hurt from the outside... I touch it with my hand, and feel the condensation of the air in its delicate and humid burned skin...

Looking up, the scars are evident, the flesh exposed, dignity looks lost....... Delicate carbonized branches in the top still struggle, screaming to a threatening sky, surviving under the rawest elements....

I stand and suffer... frozen in that moment...


Even knowing its condition, and probably embarrassed with my unexpected presence, suddenly the tree trembles with an angry scream, and slaps my soul with a painful insight, that I'm the one who's right there feeling small, condemning an unknow to pity and miserability... She's the one who is standing tall and still strong, no matter how many wounds time made on her, and she's the one who still has an alive core, which will always grow and breathe, as long as the soil feeds her with an humble meal... she's the one who still shines gold and survives because she never left her roots and never ran away from a challenge...

Watching the wold.... a neverending learning experience....

Real sometimes hurts, but it'll be always there, everywhere, around the corner, pursuing us till the end. Each day that passes I find my reality reflected in the most gigantic and exquisite mirror ever created: the outside world. Most of the time I turn my face and look elsewhere, but the omnipresent reflection will be the eternal guide to the passage through the real...


Dare to look at the mirror....................


________________________________________ ___________
José Ramos