02: past life genetic programming

After ten years of being a photographer, I'm taking a year-long break to make a book. This book is my device for thinking about a few questions, like

What is photography?

What is time?

What is memory?

What is existence?

What is this you I see before me?

What is love?

What is a day well spent?

What is this dream trying to tell me?

What matters?

These questions make no sense.

But I don't think we are here to make sense of anything at all.

We are just here to live and answer questions imperfectly all day long.

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Replace 'fiction' with 'photography' in this quote by David Foster Wallace:

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties – all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion – these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”

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Draft:

My default state - going to cities far away, walking around as an unknown entity and watching people from afar, talking to no one and forming no emotional connections. During such times my camera acts as a shield thrust between me and the world. The camera prevents anyone from knowing my name. After awhile the anonymity becomes addictive.

Being a photographer fulfils a guttural urge in me to be separate from the world. Where does this urge come from? Maybe childhood trauma, maybe past-life genetic programming. But provenance doesn't matter. What matters is that this urge exists and is the driving force behind why I am a photographer.

Always part of something but never really part of something.

A safe distance from the core of things.

(Let's dive deeper: Is it really safe?)

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I missed out on writing last week because I was in Finland, snowboarding and tobogganing and running through mild blizzards feeling mildly ecstatic - even though we weren't lucky enough to catch the aurora borealis - and that took too much out of me. I didn't write, even though I said I would. I guess I under-estimated how much time and energy it takes for me to write something. I'm not someone with a ton of energy to start with.

Now I'm back in Singapore and back at work on the book. A lot of things conspire to keep me from working on it. Tempting/interesting photography assignments and jobs that I have to learn to say no to, the most random errands that come out of nowhere, nieces and nephews who are so cute it's hard to resist spending time with them, concerts to attend because once I missed a concert by my favorite musician and she died, friends you feel guilty about not seeing, drowsy spells in the afternoon. So many distractions.

And of course, the pain of putting things together, of giving the project a feasible, attractive shape. Creating is hard.

But long walks have never failed me. Yesterday, on another walk, I settled on a shape for the book, a direction that makes me feel a little less nauseous inside. I'll share this shape with you once I feel more certain about things. In the meantime, thank you for your patience and for muddling through this with me.

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Gradually my pictures became more about what I felt in my day-to-day wanderings and not so much about subject. They started to be about the shapes and forms I was seeing and drawn to, suggesting a content different from their subject matter... Such pictures were like gifts from a buried self, glimpses of who I was and what I felt.
- Charles Harbutt

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See you next week!