Captured

The photo above is one of the first pictures I took after three stays in hospital and a long road to a diagnosis of an Auto-immune disease called Churg Strauss Syndrome. This was to be a diagnosis that was to change my life in so many ways - some of which were incredibly profound.

I was sat in an infusion unit waiting for my second dose of chemotherapy, my first as an outpatient. I had never felt as lonely as I did that day and this photo, to me, captures exactly that. I was in a lonely dark place.

Little did I know, I was in complete, all encompassing denial about what was happening to me, my life as I used to know had gone but I refused to accept it. This wasnt a deliberate action, I just didn’t know how to deal with so many changes all at once and chose to bury my head in the sand, that included burying my head in the sand, lying to myself and to those closest to me. An ostrich could have learnt a lot from me.

So, this kind of answers the “Why me?” portion of the title as this was the number one question I continued to ask myself instead of dealing with what I was facing. This is by no means a sob story as im fully aware of those that face and have faced a lot worse it is merely a narrative to how I discovered a passion for photography.

Being forced to lie in a hospital bed for weeks on end tends to give you a lot of time to think. I was no different. I thought about my past, and my present, but in that time my future didn’t exist. Previous work, my family, my children and my friends were areas that continued to go round and round in my head. The realisation of how much we take for granted is a stark one and it takes something genuinely life changing to make us wake up to life.

The majority of our lives are consumed by things that don’t matter, we walk around with our head so far up our backside we never see or appreciate the things and the people that we should all be relentlessly appreciative of.

Photography allows me, and most importantly reminds me to appreciate everything we were put on this planet to see. When I capture an image it generally makes a memory and the feelings of that memory as fresh as the time I took it.

“Why Photography?” If the answer to that isn’t “Why not?” after reading this then perhaps you are just like the old me that just needed a good kick up the backside in which my head was located.

Craig