Valentine’s day edition: The arc of the image

Revered and reviled, Valentine’s day is a day of surprise, obligation, dread, and happiness. As a narrative, it’s a fulcrum around which our lives revolve. The date stays the same. We change. The hearts we draw for our parents. The cards and candies we get from our peers. The rejection. The acceptance. The early dates. The later dates. Before we’re married. After we’re married. And so it goes, an unending arc traversing our lives.

And so goes the lifespan of the image. Some break orbit and step out of time, remembered for their significance, in part for their achievement and in part because history preserves the context, an amber encasing a moment in time.

More commonly, though, we see the image and its derivatives weather and wither. At first they challenge, then they intrigue. They move from insightful to stylish to popular to common to staid until it all simply fades. The look stays the same. But we change. We begin by feeling the function. We finish by seeing the form, until the meaning is lost, and society has moved on. Which is all to say that we can take the same picture every single day, but we won’t capture the same meaning each time.

Hopefully, as creators, by that time it all changes, we move on, as well.