The Curse of the Photographer

Photography is a cruel art. One that involves you in a moment. Physically involves your

presence, and yet, you personally are removed from it. There is a line between experience and demonstration, and photography was the culmination where these two worlds collide. The demonstration that I capture is the experience for others. Normally you, or rather I can

distance myself from this. Sometimes it is as simple as being a job that you do, but there were other times when this was not the case, and this was the curse of the photographer.

But it is an art I feel I cannot turn away from. Maybe it is a form of self-consciousness, of

recognition that the world is so readily fleeting that I feel I need to capture scenes of it for

posterity, in the vain hope that somewhere someone might also capture me in their art.

But even this notion I can’t fully concede to because I know there are other elements to the

art form. Recognition of the unseen, attention to the unheralded, a photograph can be like a

spotlight to something silent. The way the light bends through curves, and yet is always a

straight line. The way people pass through shadows into the light of the way the brightness of the day can strip the world of its colour. I was finding, especially with my photography, that the photos I am striving for most are those where colour is, not absent, but not directly there. When the sea is so bright it becomes sheeted in glary white, but then, in a corner there is nestled a small pocket of truth to its colour. The bleeding of the world. I do not believe in a world absent of colour, but I love this visual of difference and idea that thought the sun was the source of colour when sometimes it is the absence.

Sometimes I am like a shark, sluicing through the swathes of people, that unassuming dead

eye stair unfocused on anything, but attentive to everything and then suddenly, before you even know there is a shark in the water, an attack. A flash of light and a candid photograph is

taken. I only ever offer a brief conciliatory smile and then I’m back to the waters, unseen.

And it is the ruthlessness of a shark that was needed at times. You have to be ruthless.

Ruthless. Not just with the world but with yourself.

My best friend proposed to his girlfriend, and she became his finance, the moment captured, the transition stolen from the fleeting pages of history by the click of my camera shutter. After the moment and that confusion as to what to do now, we went off to tell her parents. My best friend went to put his arm around me. Celebratory and relief in a moment of thanks and appreciation, but my mind was on another moment. His newly crowned fiancé was approaching her parents, their very first embraces about to take place, the joy of two parents hugging their daughter for the first time as a finance, engaged to the man of her dreams, and so, I pulled away from my best friend and from a moment that would get no second chance, all to capture something else. In all honesty, he might not even remember that moment, might not have realized that I pulled away or that it haunts me to this day. I know what my best friend would say. ‘Put the camera down, leave it. We don’t need photos, just the memories.’ He would say all the right things, as most people would, and maybe for me that is the currency I need. But I also know the smile of confessed delight when someone sees a picture of themselves that they like. Candid. An action shot. A moment stolen from the mortal world and imprinted. And within that lifeless frame are the antecedents of truth and our existence. I wish I could put down the camera but there is too much joy in this world

that’s lost and forgotten, too much beauty that is fleeting. Pain leaves a scar that is forever

sensitive to the touch, so I steal beauty from moments I would like to exist in.

If you asked my friends if they have any pictures of me, the answer would probably be no,

(this is not a criticism) but of them I have thousands. Thousands of moments, camping, parties, picnics, games – all these moments that according to the pictures, I don’t exist in and didn’t exist in, and yet, I was more intimately present than anyone there. If you were to cast a net back through the photographs of history I am there as all photographers are there. Silent specters walking among the shadows of the true face of the world. I know which people from the way they move, the way they shift in their seat or shift their stance, that love a camera. I know which people find it uncomfortable and I love those who feel they don’t need it but smile when they see it.

Photographs are a way to justify something we shouldn’t have too. ‘Look, I was there. There.

Look.’ The photographic evidence that places us at the scene of the crime. ‘I participated in

life, see there I am’, and I understand the photo is more for them than anyone else. It is a

curse being a photographer. To participate so fervently in life and yet not be present in the

moments that made up life. To be aware and unable to steal away.

Writer and Photographer based in London