Originally published on medium.com
I bought my first camera nearly 15 years ago. It was pretty much a flimsy box with a plasticky ultra-wide lens designed for widest possible angle of view and also put everything in focus. It was one of those one-time use cameras with pre-loaded film, something that pre-digital photographers might remember. I upgraded fast. My next purchase was an entry level film SLR. A professional then would have called it an ‘entry level’ toy, but it was all glass and glitter for a newbie like me. Those days, any SLR camera would turn heads and make a lot of people pause and look at you with starry eyes. Some would approach me with an evident admiration and ask if I was a professional. I wasn’t, then.
My equipment kept changing. I quickly moved to an entry-level digital SLR. In a few years when I evolved to call myself a professional photographer, I had a big clunky black box that helped me make images in most challenging situations.
Upgrade in photography equipment came easy. The more money I made, the better equipment I bought and used them to make technically superior images. But the search for images that said something new, images that spoke about something extraordinary, remained relentless.
Over the course of these 15 years, I have moved along with the trends in image making. At times, I have managed to break the trends and create images to my own appeal. I have won awards and acquired much admiration. I have added clients whose names could make others envious and have gained praises that have occasionally made me swell a little. A self-indulgent look at the history of my photography shows a long evolution, partly aided by my visual capabilities, partly by the technological progress and partly with influence from other photographers. Yet, there are many milestones that remain unachieved.
I have often asked myself questions about the purpose of my photography and the goals that my images should achieve. As I write this, a realization occurs to me that the goals themselves — those milestones and posts — aren’t fixed parameters. The post keeps shifting.
In my formative years of photography, I went in search of beautiful images that were an exemplary combination of great light and colours in the natural world. It could have been blooming flowers in the wild, mountain peaks bathed in morning sun, flow of water in a picturesque environment or a colourful pair of wings taking off from the trees. I found considerable satisfaction in photographing majestic landscapes and little success in freezing the avians. The former became a passion and obsession.
With time, I acquired equipment that made my images better. Complex filters allowed photography in extreme contrast and lighting that a camera wouldn’t handle well. Expensive glasses created better reproduction of the world that unfolded in front of me. The images found their way to magazines, books, catalogues, brochures and all sorts of places. They kept me going further in search of making more images, and sometimes working to create more salable images.
Through all those growth years, the primary questions continued to persist. Why am I making these images? What is the purpose of every single image that is produced by pressing this shutter? Is this one photograph I am about to make now going to be extraordinary enough to change something in this world?
The questions were not always about making a mark in the external world; they were also about an internal thought process. What satisfaction do I derive from making images? Will I be making photographs that I will keep looking back at, and feel good to see some kind of a fragrance exuding from them? What is compelling me into making images?
At first, answers to such questions seem to arrive quickly. All I wanted to do was to create something that looked beautiful. But the goal-post kept moving with time and the old answers were no-longer satisfying. In later days, I wanted to emulate the kind of images that I admired from other photographers. At some point in time, I wanted to create images that had a deep social impact and perhaps even changed the world. Some such goal-posts were reached with time, and some always remained distant.
But the primary questions were always constant: what images do I want to make next, and why do I want to make them?
Something dawned in me a year ago, when I was in the highlands of Ladakh, photographing its winter landscapes. These are rugged landscapes — high altitude desert with insufficient oxygen and extreme variation in temperature. Winter nights see -25C and lower. However, extraordinary things take shape only in extreme situations. In here were beautifully meandering streams frozen-still in the valleys flanked by snow-covered peaks. In here were frozen-solid lakes and occasional blocks of ice breaking off from their smooth skating-rink like surface. I watched with awe, the bubbles of air trapped in huge sheets of ice, forming extraordinary shapes. I loved the white-out landscape through which blades of brown grass stood out patiently waiting for summer days.
Related links:
A photography tour to Ladakh in Winter
Himalayan Photography Tours
These landscapes were extraordinary. Sometimes I just stood there gawking with awe at the beauty of the minutest details in nature’s creation. Sometimes, I looked up at the magnificent mountains that dominated the landscape. I admired the extreme cold that defied the sunny weather. In those moments, the world seemed so charming that I would just want to embrace it and do little else.
On those days, it would be a long time before I eventually took out my camera and began documenting the unfolding magic. Once I had the camera in hand, I would begin with careful observation of the world outside, looking for beauty in everything small and large, looking to compare those opposing elements, and eventually searching for ways to make them all fit beautifully into a photograph. It was a constant quest, first searching outside, and then searching within myself for visuals that held my attention.
One afternoon, we were at a small hot-water springs that gushed out of earth in a wide open valley. It was amusing to watch boiling-hot water emerge from an earth that was surrounded by solidly frozen ice. The sprinkles of water carried away by the air landed in the spring’s neighbourhood and created curious minute decorations all around the fountain. Foot-long grass that grew in summers was now flat on the ground, brought down by small chunks of ice that was stuck to the blades. I watched the patterns in ice and the grass with great fascination. When I looked up, I saw the geyser’s water dazzle against the shining sun surrounded by beautiful deep blue sky.
The place had me hooked. I began photographing this wonder, first focusing my attention on the spring and then drifting slowly towards its surroundings. I moved around the neighbourhood, and eventually settled to photographing just the geyser and its vicinity in every conceivable angle. There, time kept ticking as I shifted my attention from one corner to another. I observed and photographed the patterns in ice for a very long time. I watched the smooth strands of grass with chunks of ice on them. I looked carefully at the way wind was making the fountain waver like a dancer. I gazed at the way sun made the ice sparkle like a diamond. I wondered about the strong rays that made the spring water shine like a blaze.
Before I knew it, a few hours had passed, and I had not moved beyond a few meters around the hot-spring. I was in a spell, which was finally broken when a setting sun ended the magic of light that enthralled me through the evening.
Later that evening, I went through the large collection of images I had produced at the hot-spring. Some images were to my satisfaction, some images were nothing special and many were somewhere in between. I went through them several times, searching for the perfect image that could help me relieve the trance-like experience of the evening.
As I revisited the evening’s images a few times over, something suddenly dawned in my mind. Those hours I had spent photographing the geyser was a time I was in complete focus, and perhaps in a feeling of bliss. They were moments of joy and fulfillment that had carried me through the evening and had lingered well into the night. The photographs from the evening were a reflection of the landscape, but what mattered most were not the photographs, but the moments themselves! The act of photographing the geyser was an act of careful observation, which translated into an almost meditative state that allowed me to forget everything else and remain immensely attentive to the scene unfolding in front of me. In those hours, I did not for a moment remember the world I had left behind, the tasks that may have been pending, the things that I had to take care of and everything else that fogs a mind through the waking hours.
I realized at that very moment that my Zen was not in the photographs produced, but the act of photography itself. I was able to forget myself in the act, which was more significant than the outcome.
This is perhaps why many of us yearn to pursue some passions. Whether it is in music, rock climbing, a sport or an art, when performed as an act of intense focus, it stills the mind and takes us to a new level of existence. Some of these acts may have tangible outcomes (like photographs in photography) and some of them may not (like rock climbing). But unaware to us, it’s often an involvement in the act that brings us to a sense of fulfillment than the outcome of the action.
That still leaves me with one more thing. Is this the final frontier of a photographer or an artist? Or is there something more to achieve than self-satisfaction and fulfillment? There is no easy way to be certain. In the past, I have seen my goal posts shifting further. They can move again!