It’s a Kinda Magic

The blitzkrieg of spring has commanded a fresh start for me as well. As blooms burst into existence and buds erupt into a luminous green, I finally rediscovered the power (just about a desperate craving) to end yet another chapter of my own personal Kabuki.

Sporadically I fall down the chasm into a severe, disabling loneliness that borders on hopelessness. A bleak, assiduous separateness. With no apparent reason, I feel convinced that I am separate from all others and are horribly exclusive.

The despair that accompanies one of these bizarre moods is a huge black, bottomless pit out of which I can only claw my way out with savage determination. During these bleak spells it is not so much that I believe I have no one. I rather feel that I am no one. Hollow and empty.

The almost perfect isolation of winter is but a memory by now and when I compare images that I made during this desolate time to what I’m capturing currently, I find it tricky to recognize. How completely and utterly comforting that change is! The transformation of seasons has yet again reminded me that this thing called life is a set of scales.

Life in all shapes and forms means involvement. And involvement means taking risks more often than not. Taking these risks where change is inevitable, are universal and timeless. Change represents the greatest truth.

If change is universal then none of us are untouched or alone and never could be. I might not respond to the end or beginning the same way as you but what I feel when confronted with ‘feelings’ of change, might just be identical.

The plants. The animals. The insects. The whole of humanity. We all drink from a similar pond. By sipping from that same body of water, every race, every religion, every nationality becomes one amalgamated species.

We are all woven together to form the one true fabric of life.

Personification

Every time I press the shutter button, I feel a responsibility to what I capture. That overdeveloped sense of accountability is more evident when I shoot people.

I choose to blur them. Or capture them out of focus. I applaud their importance without allowing them identity.

I sometimes have to ask myself the question whether I do this to disassociate. Or could it be that I don’t particularly like what they project back at me, about myself.

Do I forget, after I press the shutter, develop the image and applaud my brilliance , the faces that I capture?

Do I think about where these unwilling subjects came from? What experience shaped them the most? Their dreams. Their passions. Their fear.

Do I contemplate their future? On what path they are finding themselves on? Their aspirations. Their struggles.

Do I imagine their expectations of pleasure? The twinkling of failure?

Do I celebrate their existence?

Do I see myself in them?

Are we being shaped by our past? Or are we being shaped by our future?

Are we the end result of all the things we’ve seen?

All the things we’ve done?

The places we’ve been?

The people we’ve had to leave behind?

All that’s happened in your life?

Is it those things that brings the light and darkness to the blank screen?

Anthony Bourdain