emi and the camera

 

Last week I took a part in the photo edition workshops in Warsaw. It was a cool experience and exhausting long hours of making the unjustified and perhaps unjustifiable decisions. A simple photograph can be given hundreds of meanings due to it’s placing.

I think that one of the things which amuse me about the photography is the ability to connect the unrelated events into a story. Maybe story is too big of a word? A sequence, a set. Something happens in one place, something happens in another place, here’s a dead bird, here’s the moon, here’s somebody I know, somebody I don’t know. Unrelated events that become linked together thankfully to a single factor.

That single factor being myself.

Maybe the fact that I spent a meaningful part of my life working in an airplane – which meant being everywhere, constantly thrown from one end of the globe to another, made me feel like I’ve been less and less present and real. In a way it was a life of a ghost – I’d never been anywhere long enough to mark my presence in any more meaningful way, but long enough to observe people and situations. I’d like to think that in some way my presence was a connecting line for all these distant places and situations.

I believe that what I call the “life of a ghost” fed my urge to collect the trophies in the form of photographs. In a way they are the silver proof – I’ve been there and I witness that exact moment. Turning them into something connected and coherent is almost like giving my presence a visual form. Maybe that’s why we say that photography is intimate. Regardless of the content, it always consists of at least the smallest particle of the person who pressed the shutter button.