This exhibition is about marking the momentary and temporary. It was surprising to me to see how many images submitted to The Ephemeral dealt with ideas of nature and the environment. Nature is undoubtedly very complicated. It is time, constant change. It is space, a place we can return to. It is where we go to get away from the sense that everything is constantly in flux. Photographs are a good way to question what we know about nature because they more or less stay the same. They are a place we can go to get away from the sense of constant change. But then, since we are part of nature, we are always changed every time we return to a photograph. And the world around a photograph, let alone culture, is constantly changing how we interpret it, even as it appears to be fixed.

The photographers in The Ephemeral have created images of fleeting moments of quiet and calm that stand out from the media’s currency of immediacy and the flood of images and information we experience on a daily basis. Our world is hyper visual; Instagram alone has 1.6billion images shared with 60million images “liked” a day. Likewise our world is a glut of information where news is shared in 140 characters that would never see a print newspaper or periodical. DCCP’s The Ephemeral exhibition online also has this companion piece in print—newsprint, to be exact. Newspaper, both a stable and instable medium, is the ideal means of sharing that which is brief and passing. It speaks to the tension in our lives between the immediate and the lasting.

-Tate Shaw