My qualms with photography

I wrote this a very long time ago and have been editing and re-editing for months. Finally, I decided that it is time to bury this piece, and the feelings that go with it, in the eternal blog grave.

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As I was packing for my journey to Moscow, I was struck with the unexpected desire to leave all of my camera equipment behind. I suddenly started to feel as though, instead of an artistic instrument, the camera had become a ball and chain—its mere presence stifling. On a lazy day off, instead of relaxing, I would find myself thinking about what I could be/should be shooting; the stories I was missing; the moments that were waiting to be branded into my memory card. And then, at some point it occurred to me that what makes it onto my memory card ultimately determines what I remember. It becomes a de-personifying process in which my memory is no more human than a laptop.

And I started thinking: if a moment or situation is so valuable that it deserves to be photographed, then, perhaps, it is more valuable to just experience it. And I don’t use the word ‘just’ as an expression of frivolity, just the opposite: it is the key for extracting the golden reality from the mine of perceived reality. All events, situations, ups, downs and all-arounds just ‘are’, regardless of the extraneous values we assign to them. Sometimes, I feel as though I am trying too hard to capture something that would be better served by a living memory than by a vibrant 8x10 print.

Outside of ‘working’ as a photographer, I started feeling like photography was invading my entire persona. I became possessed by the camera: instead of seeing the environment around me, all I saw were potential pictures and lost opportunities. Outside of shooting stories—a time during which I always developed extraordinary closeness with my subjects—I became separated from the world around me by a constant drive to make everyone and everything into a good subject. And for what? I realized that I couldn’t capture it, I couldn’t keep any given moment any longer than it existed no matter how many frames I shot. When the moment is gone, it’s gone forever. According to Eckhart Tolle, an acclaimed contemporary spiritual teacher and author of The Power of Now, the attempt to stop time and keep for the future a moment that had happened in the past borders insanity.

Then, once the ‘moments’ have been ‘captured,’ the photographer is faced with the impossible task of determining which single photo is the most precise and fair portrayal of what ‘actually’ transpired. For me, the inherent and tragic reality is that behind the camera, I was missing everything that didn’t fall within the borders of my viewfinder. I was capturing a fraction without experiencing the whole. I based my memories on a specious portrayal rather than what really was. It’s like the story my parents used to tell me about how when I was two years old I would sit in the cabinet in our old kitchen and play with potatoes. I have heard this story so many times that I don’t know if I actually remember the event or if the repeated retelling of the story generated a fake memory.

I don’t mean to offend any photographers. I believe that the work of a photographer is priceless and terribly important. After all, no books, articles, or first-hand accounts can replace the saturation of meaning carried by a single photograph. John Kaplan’s portrait series of torture victims from the civil war in Sierra Leone managed to personify a brutal war—a war that I had heard about, but that seemed so far away that it was almost unreal. Photographers put their lives on the line to show the rest of us things that we would never otherwise see. Suddenly, everything becomes so personal that you can’t close your eyes to injustice because you see faces, eyes and people, rather than facts, stories and statistics. And it’s not just wars and tragedy: cultures, celebrations, sports, nature and emotions can often be better conveyed by a photo than by any other medium. My short time as a photographer was arguably the most amazing time of my life: I met people and encountered situations that I would have never had any reason to seek out if not for my camera. Nonetheless, at least at this point in my life, I have realized that photography has to take a back seat to personal growth and experience.