(A Photography Manifesto)
Nostalgia is my drug of choice.
Most people think of nostalgia like some sort of gold-plated rearview mirror. A way of saying things were better back then. A longing for something already gone.
For Sarah and me, nostalgia is about the present moment, and the uncomfortable awareness that it won’t stay this way forever. She calls it “happy-sad.” I’ve always pointed it out when I notice that split second when you realize you’re fully alive, right here, and already losing it.
“I’m having a perfect moment!”
My short bouts of curiosity surrounding meditation have taught me that pointing it out is probably taking me out of it, but I don’t give a shit. I enjoy the shared acknowledgment, and I like seeing Sarah’s eyes narrow as she smiles and nods every time I do.
That feeling is most likely why I ended up with a camera in my hands.
I’m hyper-aware of how fast things disappear. Conversations. Light. A song playing in the background while you’re leaning on a bar. Making a photograph is my way of slowing that down just enough to say, “this mattered.”
That’s also why I shoot film. Because it’s physical. Silver gelatin turns moments into objects. You can hold them. File them. Lose them. Find them again. Proving that one-thirtieth of a second existed and ‘Proof Sheets’ placing that moment in context.
Ok, maybe nostalgia has carved out elbowroom in escapeism, but it’s also what happens when gratitude and loss occupy the same space. When you’re aware enough to notice what’s happening while it’s happening. This exact person next to you. This exact light as it’s coming through the window. This exact version of yourself. It won’t last, and it was never meant to.
People like to say “this too shall pass” as a way of getting through hard things. I hear it differently. It’s a reminder not to sleepwalk through the good ones. The laughter, the warmth, the quiet moments, the ‘fly-over days’. This too shall pass. Pay attention.
Even now, as I’m writing this, the light in the room keeps changing. A cloud slid in front of the sun, and everything shifted. That’s why I rarely photograph in studios. The light there behaves. It’s predictable. Real life isn’t. Golden hour, my ass. Most of the time, life only gives you a few golden seconds.
In the early 1900s, Alfred Stieglitz published a photography journal called Camera Work. In it, he introduced his ‘Doctrine of Equivalents’ - the idea that a photograph could express the artist’s inner state and evoke emotion instead of just trying to record what something looked like. His goal wasn’t to show what he saw, but to say, here’s how it felt.
The photographs that stay with me seem to work more like music. They pull me into a feeling.
For a long time, I thought I was making photographs for the future. For twenty or thirty years from now, so we’d remember how it felt.
I don’t believe that anymore.
Now, I’m making them to remind myself what it feels like to be alive, right now.
//rob
