For years, I admired and attempted to emulate deliberate street photographers. I walked circuits on the same blocks of New York, Paris, and Tokyo, waiting to uncover and stumble across life happening in a dark corner, a learned routine, a lucky break. I shot keepers, but when I put together collections, the memories of the moments were suspended in a haze; I’d intensely remember the moments of getting the shot, but little else. How did I feel during this shot…or after? Although I produced some good work and was happy with the results, I was left only with a photograph, nothing more. I felt like what I photographed was a distinct entity from the rest of my life; photography a form of self-assigned sleepwalking that I write into my schedule, separate from the rest of my life.
Then I started to cycle across continents.
Our lives may be made of fleeting moments, but how we tell ourselves the story of our lives is that we weave these moments together. Many Americans have the memory of going on a drive, getting home, and having a parent carry them to bed while they pretend to sleep, peering out sneakily from behind veiled eyes. We don’t remember what we saw exactly, we don’t remember the shirt our dad was wearing, or even the colour of the car we were in. We do remember the faint glow of the sunset, the telephone poles streaking by, the roll of the tyres on tarmac, and dad’s muffled voice through half-sleeping ears. Never since those days have I remembered so indistinctly but so viscerally. Cycling across Africa, shooting at speed, has yielded waves of emotion while looking back through my shots that I never experienced while shooting deliberately. I can’t remember a moment in minute detail, but I can profoundly recall the echoed hooves of camels crossing the road in the Sahara, feel the dull sting on my skin of sharp jungle plants in the Sierra Leone jungle.
Frowning on experiencing life or travel from behind a phone or camera has become a tired cliche, but the cliche itself actually contains a faulty underlying premise- that capturing fleeting moments must inherently decrease our experience of them. Instead, I’m advocating that impulsive photography creates a form of Kerouac-ian spontaneous prose as you move through life. Let the moment wash over you, and when that little impulse that tells you to squeeze the shutter button, do it. No viewfinder, or preprepared settings, only feeling and instinct. A faint glow of sunset, a fleeting moment from behind veiled eyes.
