The Photographer

An eye behind the lens, that rarely takes stage on the other side. That’s what I consider myself. More often than not, this is because the lens might not capture me as myself but as someone else. And yet again, when a person happily agrees to allow me to click their picture, I sweat. For photography is not about the fanciest camera and perfect subject. It is the window of the mind. And as it opens onto a world that cares less than little for what goes on around it, it has a job to do. In the commonest chaos of life, it sees a pattern, a momentary arrangement of color and an unconscious glance, which it has to capture, untainted by the mind’s own inadequacies, present it in the simplest manner and yet have it tell a story of a thousand words. A story told in a flitting second that stops a person, walking past the picture, right in their tracks and knocking on the window of their souls with a question. A simple question which keeps them going but with a new emotion, a feeling of longing to see what others so easily missed and yet was worth having observed and captured for posterity. And as this feeling grows from person to person, mind to mind, we start to breach the boundaries of our pervasive dogmas and start to see beauty in everything. To do all this, and in the short attention span of the subject, is hard work. But hold, be still, tilt just a little to the left and say, “Cheese!” because, I’m ready to paint that story.