I captured the least amount of photographs in 2016. The act of picking up the camera repulsed me. The times when I did feel drawn to document visually, it would feel like a burden after a few moments. Internally, I was a train-wreck. I barely wrote or even ranted much about what went on inside my head. Just like one trip on a hard drug sometime last year, where I internalized it to such an extent that it ended up as a bad trip; I gulped down most of my feelings, both happy ones and the threatening ones. I let them decay within, without letting them find an outlet, until they eventually pushed their way out aggressively one day, and I had no recourse but to succumb and confront them.
I realized that I took most things for granted in the course of the last entire year and paradoxically, it was the same year that made me value some other things much more intensely. Like most aspects, I took the camera for granted too. I abandoned it and almost thought that I would soon give up on attempting to express myself visually. But everything is ephemeral, even stagnation and blockage. As the destructive energies of 2016 culminated into the welcoming arrival of fresh beginner energies of 2017, a slow change enveloped my being. Not immediately, but gradually, I began interacting with the camera once again, finding ways to reclaim that part of me, which had stayed mute for months together.
I’ve been reading extensively about cameras and the history of photography for the past few days. How many many centuries ago, the perception towards photographs and its significance (or insignificance) has undergone its own set of phases and movements. I read with curiosity as to how encapsulating a fleeting piece of memory on a film roll has sentimental roots. From the initial processes of a daguerreotype which would consume many hours of the sun’s exposure and many more to be processed as one single photo; to this age and time, when taking a photo is an act of a split-second with the handy phone camera - we have come a long way in history and this callousness with frames is perhaps an inevitable consequence of technological advancement.
But history is an analysis and a lesson in itself. And it renders me the valuable realization that in this age of documentation and mass creativity, these “clocks for seeing” as Barthes refers to cameras, are a blessing to my own personal introspection, through an external medium. So, I approach the camera with love, with an understanding of its intrinsic value, which is far beyond money and external validation. I am documenting to remember, to commemorate the beauty of this medium. Or perhaps to let forgetting intervene, when it feels it must.
