Meditation #2: a personal reflection

This meditation is going to be a slightly longer one. It’s because, 1034 days since the start of the pandemic, the dreaded second line appeared on my COVID test. For the better part of the past two and a half years, I have been waiting and fearing this. Maybe the illness gives me some well-earned rest that is much needed after an overly active working vacation. In the rare act of self-indulgence, I lit up the candle, made myself some coffee, cracked up Nina Simone and went to town editing all the unscanned and never-looked-at work from 2022.

What I’ve seen haunted me. Enough to start writing this.

I didn’t think I’d taken a good image in 2022. A foolish belief, perhaps, but a firm one. There was no point this year where I’ve thought: yeah, I got this. But my photographs told me a slightly different story: my pictures didn’t seem all that bad! But they did feel… misguided. I distinctly remember enjoying myself most Sundays (my reserved photo days), however, this feeling is not transmitted in pictures. In a recent conversation with Sean, he told me this feeling is something every artist eventually goes through. He went out daily for a year or two before he started to see a common thread appearing in his work — and before he could lean into the internal voice he seemed to have found. If this is the case, my voice is shouting at me: “You are a mess! You are lost”. And, to give credit to my internal voice, this is how I’ve felt. How I feel now. My Sundays were my meditations; it was my alone time — my therapy. I got to go out, interact with my (overly) expensive toys, and enjoy myself. A lot of my work from the past year has not seen the light of day, neither here nor on my Instagram, for that reason. I took them for myself, and I kept them for myself. Not because I didn’t want to show them per-se, but because the work does not have any meaning: it was not what I wanted to present to the world as “my photography”. So even with the stereo remaster of “Little Girl Blue” on my headphones, the smell of the Edition candle filling my room, and the best efforts of Louis Eduardo Campos slightly cooling down in the mug, I still felt like the work in front of me was… meaningless.

Passengers walking by at Piccadilly station, London. A feeble attempt to capture the feeling of dread and constant rush which ended up in a poor copy of Alexi Titarenko.

And then I started thinking about why I got into photography in the first place: the grand Nat Geo stories by the likes of John Stanmeyer or Ami Vitale. The photo essays of Gene Smith and H.C.B. and the travel photography of Steve McCurry. What they all have in common (aside from the photography level beyond my wildest dreams) is a sense of narrative. A story. My work does not have that. And more importantly, even if it did, I do not think I would know what to do with it. Instagram is crap for the longer form of work. Maybe I could publish it here on my blog (with an average of 10 viewers per post) or Substack (50 if I’m lucky)?

This train of thought got me thinking about a conversation I had with my man Wei the last time we were out and about. We noticed independently that we don’t see our mates out and about, shooting “street”. For the laymen, it means just going out, shooting what we like thematically and aesthetically, without an agenda or a story. His explanation for this phenomena is the decline of popularity of “street”. If you want to be a popular photographer you have to “work on a project”, or be in a business of “telling a story”. It’s not cool to just “shoot street” anymore. This felt wrong to me at the time; how can everyone suddenly find a meaningful story? Aside from my personal work on my family, there is little that drags me to photograph it; that I would sacrifice work or vacation to go and seek out. But also there is an issue of time. KC and I were discussing long ago how one can’t be a journalist and a documentary photographer part-time. How could all of our friends suddenly, within a month or two, find their story and find the time to pursue it? I don’t believe they are vain enough to do it just for the “cool” factor, but also, I didn’t think everyone found this natural drive at the same time either. But now, sitting in front of my work, I was getting their point. Some people, like Wei, can produce a jaw-dropping work they find meaning in simply by walking, seeing. I on another hand, clearly cannot. So should I change something?

“Always wear a hat”: that one day where I was looking for hats in London: part 1

“Always wear a hat”: that one day where I was looking for hats in London: part 2

It may seem, from my ramblings and dissatisfaction earlier that yes, indeed I should. Because the reason why I got into photography was to tell stories. To do grand assignments that would take me all over the world in a pursuit for the issue so complicated only I can tell it, and to make images that will make people feel a whirlwind of emotions. But that is not why I photograph. It is what I’d love to achieve, but it’s not why I do it.

I do it largely for myself. Because I want to go out, to take a long walk. To think in a different way than I do in my lab/in front of the computer. To play with knobs and buttons of my camera. And to make memories of my time there. And there is nothing wrong with that. I’ve been out shooting on 23 Sundays this past year, and each one of them I felt better in the evening than I did in the morning. Does that justify expensive gear and time that went into it? Maybe not. But at the end of the day, I enjoyed it. And in a way, that is all that matters.

This year, I went out on some of the nicest Sundays of the year…

… and some of the coldest ones.

In a long and roundabout way, what will I change then, to avoid this feeling in 365 days?
Everything and nothing. I fully understand that I do not have the time, ideas, or the capacity to do the work I love seeing (yet). But also, this doesn’t mean that I should give up on it. But instead of cocooning my way in secretive “projects” that I won’t know how to deal with, maybe I should just focus a bit more while out. Still go out with my mates and dither about, but rather than keep my stuff for myself, let the world see it, here on my blog and on substack.

But every time I’m out there, have one ear open, listening for that elusive story.