On Photography
after months of feeling uninspired
I was in LA for four months earlier this year on a TV writing job. But sometimes, I’m not even sure LA really happened. How so many days can turn into a questionable blip amazes me. But when I prod a bit more, remember, the days come back to me. The hours we spent in the writers’ room discussing story. The late nights as we scrambled to make edits to a script. And perhaps it is because this job required all my creative energy that none was left for much else.
Since coming home in July and returning to my normal routine in Brooklyn, I’ve been uninspired to say the least. I’ve had to edit scripts and pitch rewrites for jobs, but when I’d sit at the page to write something new, something wholly my own, nothing would come. I was worried there might be a yearly supply of creativity allotted, and mine was up. I sat in my friend’s apartment, secretly going through my google docs on my phone while she talked to try and see the last time I had written. I was scared, genuinely, that I might not be able to again.
When I got home that night, the used camera I ordered weeks ago had finally arrived. The next morning, a few weeks before leaving for London, I pulled it out and went on a photo walk with my roommate. In my hands the camera felt strange. The photos weren’t coming out quite right and I felt like I was trying something I didn’t understand. Like I was a toddler with a new toy, and just like a toddler, I had the urge to abandon it almost immediately, to run off in favor of a different shiny thing.
I bought a camera to learn photography, but moreso to practice the craft of directing. Directing is deceptively easy, but in its most eminent form, it reveals intentionality in each frame. It often requires bringing vision to an empty room, or seeing beauty and opportunity in a space you’re forced to use. It is the marriage of angles, people, and story. And I truly believe that to develop a visual language, a taste for images that is unique and reflects how you see the world and the people in it, is one of the most difficult things to do.
I wanted to figure out exactly how it is that I see the world — what draws my attention, what prompts me to lift my camera. What I didn’t expect was that it would change the way I move through spaces. Keep me places longer. Drive me to wander.
London is the first city where I wander, starting at the famed Portobello Road Market that is closing just as I arrive.
On the first day in this new city, my camera feels like an obligation. A duty to discover the beautiful, the off-kilter, the unexpected colors. Oftentimes, when I raise it, I convince myself that what I’m about to capture is so understood to be beautiful that it might not be worth capturing at all. A rose pink building with several tourists ogling in front of it. Flowers blooming through a gate with even more tourists ogling in front of it. I wonder if this is something every beginner photographer experiences. It feels like I need to find the underskin, something hidden, though I’m not sure what.
As the hours go by and the streets grow quiet, it’s easier to bring out my camera. Easier to accept that what is beautiful is beautiful, and click.
But the urge to find the underskin in places doesn’t leave me. In Marylebone a few days later, I run into Daunt Books, a famed bookstore that I had forgotten was on my list of places to visit.
The front window celebrates Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, and inside is a gorgeous array of bookshelves flooded with sunlight and eager hands. I walk to the basement and at the bottom of the staircase, I see an ugly storage room where a man reviews books on a table, everything drowning in yellow and sterile white and the brown of cardboard boxes. Normally, I would have walked straight past. I click quickly, not wanting the man to see me. I’m still afraid of how people might react to being unwitting subjects in my photos. I’ve been told the art of street photography requires this unabashedness, but I don’t have it in me just yet.
Instead, I pretend to take photos of other things as I slowly move toward the photo I really want — a woman in a beautiful green dress next to a building or a child fighting with another child over a soccer ball in the park.
I have never seen the world this way. With a lens around my neck. I have gone on trips with the sole mission of writing about what I see, and I remember the distinct feeling of my brain focusing on how I might translate beautiful sights to words, mentally collecting bits of conversations and moments around me. With a camera, I’m simply searching, and when anything is found, there’s nothing to store after the click.
I watch two high school girls in uniform giggling on a bench in Regent’s Park. They pass one of their phones back and forth and I wonder who they’re drafting a text message to. I find myself aching to snap a photo of them, but I’m too close and afraid of them seeing me. They’re young and I don’t want them to worry about a stranger taking their picture. Even though the colors, the energy, the composition is perfect. One fixes her hijab as it comes undone because she’s laughing so hard. As I watch them, I find myself growing a bit sick for that naïve adolescence, for days spent spinning myself into knots contemplating if I was brave enough to sneak out, for the unusually long drives to school, for the sticky summer during which I experienced infatuation so strong it settled in my gut as something I believed to be love.
I start to make up stories as I search for the hidden. A partially deflated soccer ball left outside a house. How often did the child play with it before it was abandoned? I stand here for a while. I can’t get the angle right. Something feels off no matter how many times I click.
A few days later, my friend and I visit the small town of Canterbury. It’s charming and quaint, and a crooked bookstore is one of the main attractions, as well as a cathedral. Now that I’m with someone, I place her in the frame whenever I get the chance. Pick up that book. No, don’t smile. Move two steps to the right.
There are a few distinct times when I’ve felt a physical shift in the way I view the world. And this is one of them. I didn’t think I’d start to create stories for people, but it happens naturally as I watch them for longer than normal to see where in the frame they might end up.
By the end of my days in London, I have a sense for what draws me in. Long streets that meander into the distance, steeples peeking through trees, bursts of color from objects and dresses and motorcycles, cobblestone, doorways and better yet, doorways inside of doorways. It feels more natural now, the times when I lift my camera. And the days I put it away, I walk faster, take in things quicker, forget that there might be something beautiful at my feet.
The photos shared here are all unedited. I have not attempted to learn photo editing yet.
Copying Susan Sontag with this title, forgive me!
incredible review of the Fuji x100T ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
What you wrote is as much about life as it is about photography. Beautifully written!