The Photography Experience

This post has been a bit delayed by life circumstances, but don’t let that diminish how impactful this trip was to me. I keep telling people that this was my first time at the beach and my wife corrects me - “No it’s not, you went as a kid, you’ve told me stories.” Yes, she’s right. I’ve been to a beach, but not with this spark in my eye, not with a camera to help me show you what I experienced. I have even been to this exact beach before, eight years ago. This time, everything is different.

There is an incomprehensible chain of events that bring us to the current moment. In life we are blind to everything around us, with the future veiled and the past obscured beyond our own memory and perceptions. We are within our own minds, exploring this world as a submarine explores the depths of the ocean. We may stand in one place twice, but each time we see an entirely new landscape. This isn’t necessarily because the things before us have changed, but because we have changed. It’s a bit like reading your favorite book or watching your favorite show for the fifteenth time and you realize suddenly, you notice something you didn’t notice before. Perhaps you weren’t looking for whatever you noticed. Whatever the cause, you weren’t ready to see it. When I was here last, if I was doing photography back then, this is the type of image I would have produced (see above)…

…In great contrast to these other images. My story then was missing what followed. I wasn’t ready to see these things. I didn’t know that these images would excite me.

We tell our stories, paint our paintings, and snap our photos as a desperate grasp for the preservation and propagation of meaning, purpose, and identity. There is something strange and unique in our experiences that must live on. Without much thought, this imperative is all-pervasive with the human race. With every word, note, brush stroke, and shutter press we search for comprehension.

I believe that the moments that lead me to take a photo are captured within the photo itself. While pressing the shutter button may be an effortless task, I choose a destination, a time of day, a season, compose the objects within the frame, with each choice driven by a subconscious force. This isn’t all. The moment of the shutter press follows those decisions but the culmination of my experience pulls my finger down. In these moments, I am fighting an internal struggle to remain within my own body as I am drawn into the scene. A bit of me lives within these grains of sand, and I am a mote upon a mountain, in an endless range soon to be washed away by the ephemeral water in its eternal ebb and flow.

If I had one problem with photography, it would be the same problem that plagues all forms of art and communication. It is lossy, in the sense that this image does not tell you how to feel gentle breeze on my skin, or how cold the water is, or how loud the waves were. It does not communicate the sense of adrenaline in my blood, and it does not convey the way these sensations are made meaningless by the scale of cause of these perceptions. The ocean is terrifying, and it is beautiful. It is still, and it is always moving, violently battering the shore. The sun is so distant and benign, a ball of hydrogen so unfathomably immense that it will burn with lethal force forever. These thoughts and perceptions flood my mind.

The lossy issue with communication is part of the art of photography. This is not a flaw. A good photograph can communicate the hunger I feel at five in the morning, the same sensation that drives these gulls to find fish. The way I describe these images as perceptions may seem strange, but the images can tell us about them if we look deep enough. These hidden messages and unseen stories give our photos purpose and value far beyond a simple image. To put it into other words, if I had one problem with photography, it would be that the images are not seen and understood for what they truly are.

I do believe that everyone can experience such moments if they so allow. Most days we are locked within our bodies filling the roles we have without much thought for the significance of the multitudes of events around us. It is my prayer that people seeing these images may feel a glimpse of these perceptions and allow them to become part of their own existence.

Take in these images and discover the stories within.