sublime #19
winter sun and photographs that I didn't take
It snowed on the Saturday and at first we thought it’d be washed away in Sunday’s rain but the forecasted showers turned out to be more of a heavy mist and even then it hugged a different hill to the one on which I live. We trudged in the slush on Sunday, my hair sparkling with diamond droplets. I took a picture on my phone of a distant tree cloaked in fog.
Temperatures dropped and the slush became ice, topped with a fresh dusting of snow to coat everything white again. We walked in it every day except one, a day we gifted ourselves to rest our muscles and dry our boots. Every day it crossed my mind that perhaps I should take the camera out with me and every day I chose the freedom of leaving it behind. I am very careful about when I choose photography over Not-Photography and that slow week felt more like it should be a ‘live life with my heart first and eyes second’ kind of time. It’s a complex relationship to articulate; taking pictures for a living but also living through taking pictures. It’s my way of exploring the world and deciding my place in it which others might confuse for a ‘being present’ versus not being so, but that’s not really the case for me. I don’t think.
Anyway.
A week of snow and the pictures I took only existed in my head. Tree shadows and bird tracks and a clear, blue cloudless sky. Halos around the sun, branches heavy with snow, crystalline leaves, layers of hills and fields and sky that looked like they were painted in oil. The day before the temperatures were due to rise I panicked that I’d missed my chance and vowed to get up before the sun to walk one last walk but this time make the pictures in my head become real. I’d missed the “proper” snow pictures - the white-out vistas and colourless scenes that look good on Christmas cards. No perfectly frozen pond or patch of grass without sledge tracks. Footprints everywhere, debris, slumped snowmen. But I did find beauty and though it wasn’t the beauty I had in my head the world found new ways to show off to me. I bring you lessons in blue and gold and something called apricity (the warmth of the sun in winter.)
And show off it did!! What a stunning collection of photos, India. The last one looks like an eye, just waking.
Can I call it a ‘conflict’? The freedom of a no-camera stroll within a photographer’s mind and habits?
I was thinking about that Toni Morrison quote, the other day…
“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
Gorgeous, of course. And totally relate to that “freedom of leaving the camera behind” feeling (but then, the agony when you spot something and wish you had it 🫠)