Eternal Return

“Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said “You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!” then you wanted all back. All anew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored — oh then, you loved the world. Eternal ones, love it eternally and evermore; and to woe too, you say: go but return! For all joy wants — eternity.”

Nietzsche in Zarathustra

It’s been 3 years since I started taking photographs as a conscious reaching for something like “art”. For most of that time I have been working in the frame provided by the term “street photography”.

Street Photography is a genre or subspecies of photography that, depending on who you listen to, either does or doesn’t have strict “rules” that determine whether or not a particular image falls under the rubric “street”.

The most commonly shared “rule” is that there must be a human subject somewhere in the photograph. Otherwise, your photo, like the one above, must be relegated to some other genre.

For that reason, I stood in that place between light rail transit stations waiting for a pedestrian to turn the corner and walk in such a way that I could catch their silhouette against the dollop of light at the end of the garage there.

But no one came.

So I fired off a couple of shots and carried on in my return to one of the newer train stations sprung up around Bangkok to shoot again what I’d shot the first time I came here a couple of weeks ago just to take my first ride on a monorail and to see a photography exhibit at a gallery in the outer reaches of the city.

The problem for me is that, while I am interested in recording images of people that either illustrate their relation to the urban context or catch them in some gestural moment that strikes me as graceful or dynamic, the whole urban environment is what I am drawn to. Waiting around for “people” to enter the frame when something has caught my eye seems like such a waste to me. When I see I-beams and pipes and concrete pillars, I see people.

I suppose you could say that nothing that humans have created or despoiled is alien to me.

I have digital sticky notes on my desktop to remind me that my indifference to the presence of actual living breathing human subjects in a photograph is not something I suffer from all alone:

Wim Wenders:

‘A street, or a house front, or a mountain, or a bridge, or a river, or whatever, is not just “background”. Each also has a history, a “personality”, an identity that deserves to be taken seriously.’

Harry Gruyaert:

“In Europe and especially France, there’s a humanistic tradition of people like Cartier-Bresson where the most important thing is the people, not so much the environment. I admired it, but I was never linked to it. I was much more interested in all the elements: the decor and the lighting and all the cars: the details were as important as humans. That’s a different attitude altogether.”

Saul Leiter:

I never thought of the urban environment as isolating. I leave these speculations to others. It’s quite possible that my work represents a search for beauty in the most prosaic and ordinary places. One doesn’t have to be in some faraway dreamland in order to find beauty. I realize that the search for beauty is not highly popular these days. Agony, misery and wretchedness, now these are worth perusing.

After all this time, I don’t think I can say I’ve become a “good” photographer. But more and more I can say that I’m starting to know what I like, what I want to do with a camera.

And I know that it is easier to use words to say what I don’t like: obsessing over gear and pixels and dynamic range and “nailing the focus”. For all of that I refer myself to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s infamous “As for living, our servants will do that for us” just substituting “art” for “living” and “tech” for “servants”.