One of my pastime activities is catching light onto a sensor.
It’s not about a need to report my life, nor chasing any excessive, rare imagery. Not about the most beautiful moments1, or bragging where I travelled.
I suppose it became a pleasurable thing because it changes the mental mode, putting me in different awareness state. I don’t want to fill my camera with mundane or obvious objects, therefore I process the “phenomenal world” as something to re-contextualize and re-frame, to tell a shortest possible story with one image at a time. I become sensitive to every outlier and every visual jest of my reality, I get more aware of tensions and dialectics of certain situations. Perceiving more:
- struggle and peace
- love and loneliness
- community / humanism vs isolation / egoism
- resilience / life vs decay / death
It’s also a perfect way of spending my time when enjoying other activities. I might like meeting my colleagues and friends, but my mind prefers short engagements - with a camera in my arsenal I can always excuse my companion/s and proceed to silent appreciation of environment, observing, catching light again.2
Footnotes
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Experiencing beauty of material world, despite being nice thing, recently raises my suspicion as valuing beauty is heavily dictated by primitive, biological mechanisms. More thoughts on this topic will hopefully arrive here. ↩
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Topic needs expansion on the aspects mentioned by Susan Sontag in her delightful book of essays “On photography”. ↩