I agree.

In that instant that blade of grass is "life" and "times" ... nothing else
exists.

BernieM

I will refer you to the link for the book that UC provided in his
original post, the author speaks more elegantly to this issue then I
can.

I have known people who ended up with a lifetime of photographs that
missed capturing anything at all that would give a sense of time or
culture.  I inherited my grandmother's photographic collection when
she pasted away, she took large number of photos during the 50s and
60s. She was and advanced amateur and was considered to be a good
photographer.   And whereas her photos are well enough composed you can
go through just about the whole collection and not see any clue as to
when they were taken.  They were all landscapes and there are no
people, cars or anything else dealing with people in any of them.  Now
I love looking at old photos, and when I received the collection, all
slides BTW, I looked forward to seeing life through her eyes, what I
got was devoid of any real interest.

To a large extent I use the missed photographs that I did not take 30
years ago as a guild for what I photograph today.  I also look at what
my parents missed photographing in their life, the photographs that
would have real value to me today but at the time were not deemed
important enough to be worth a photo.

There are parts of life that seem so ordinary at the time that people
don't even think to take a photograph of it.  As just one example
part of my life growing up was when the TV stopped working we would
remove all of the tubes and take the bunch to the local hardware store.
There we would one by one put them in the tube tester, once the bad
tube was found the clerk in the store would go to the shelves an get us
a new tube.   Now a photo of someone checking a bag full of tubes at
the time would have seemed silly and boring, but it is a slice of life
that I would have loved to have had captured and have now.

Now photos of a forest in the fog are a easy to find, and they are
quite nice to look at, as an example
http://search.pbase.com/search?q=forest+fog&begin=10

But think about this, photography is very much like a time machine, it
lets us go back and get glimpses of the past.  Imagine you have 10
minutes to use a time machine that lets you view the past on a given
date, say to the time when you were 10 years old.  You can wander
around and view the world frozen in time what would you look at?  I
would want to look at the people I knew and are gone.  I would want to
look at the house I grew up in.  I would want to look at the old stores
I use to go to as a kid.  I would look at the drive-in we used to go
to.  I would look at the people, the cars and the city, oh and that
tube tester.

There is nothing wrong with photographing forest in the fog with the
sunlight coming though just right, I do it myself.  But these are in
some ways the easy shots.  You see something that is beautiful, where
the play of light looks just right and you capture it.  What is harder
and for me personally more important is to try and capture want is
around me now that will be interesting 10, 20 or 100 years from now.
There is nothing that says you can't take both kinds of photos.

Scott

Impossible. Photography is not an d cannot be art. It is directly
connected with this or that particular time and place. Thinking
otherwise leads to crappy photos in an attempt to do the impossible.
Photography's 'hereness' and 'nowness' should be celebrated, not fought
against.

It's not 'tricky', but impossible.