Streaming Photography

I’ve been working with a coach because I want channel my passion for photography into a profession that will nurture and sustain me financially as well as emotionally and creatively. Toward that end, one of the first tasks she assigned me was to write, in streaming thought mode, about what photography means to me. I didn’t reread any of what I had written until just prior to my next appointment two weeks later and I have to say that I was floored by what I read. The following triptych is the as-written, unedited assignment.

Photography

Photography is me touching the world, holding the bits and pieces in my heart and finding myself in every capture. I shoot, I collect, I create; alchemy of light and spirit revealing what may be hidden to the naked eye, what fades from view in a world teeming with must-do’s and gotta-go’s.

I see myself camera to cheek, voyeur to pain and suffering, love and fear, reckless laughter and convulsive sobs. The eye tells all. The subject is freed from normal constraints, from the strictures of propriety and, in a slicing glance, tells me what words can never convey.

I shoot, I move, I speak gently, connecting not just with my lens but with my own pain and vulnerability, with my memories, with my experience, with that part of my being that can only be seen in moments like these when the camera becomes a portal allowing you to come to me.

At The Opening

The gallery is made alive with the life force held not nearly frozen in the interaction of chemical and paper, ghosts but seconds away from stepping out from within the frame to mingle with the wine-sipping guests. The viewers look and discuss, interpreting, deciding, blaspheming, spilling opinion all over my offerings. But I am there amongst my offspring, rubbing shoulders and hearts with the residual energy of one explosive moment in time when spirit and pixels collide, forever fused one to the other. I vacantly smile and give thanks, feeling the power of the images working on me, on the others, on the walls and lights and ruby red carpet. Only I can see who is real and who is not and grin widely at my peopled creations.

End of the day

Alone in my room I undress, taking off my clothes as well as my defenses, placing them at the foot of my bed. They look odd, strangely like slithered-out-of snake skin. There is my pride, my ego, my holier-than-thou, draped over my tripod; there is the part of me that says ‘I am a photographer. I am and you are not.” The boorish editor who normally occupies my left brain finds herself snagged on the quick release. These are not the essence of my self, the true artist, the one whose heart connects across the Nikon bridge. They intrude, they taint, they sabotage. Only when I have managed to bind and gag them does the beauty of the model, of the moment, of the creation reveal itself. And with each new digital gift my power swells from within the secret place inside of me. Photography reveals me to myself.