Do you carry a camera with you? Searching for frames nonstop, hunting for slots of reality that can be captured and transformed into art? Can you replace it – instead of the camera – and walk with the soul on your shoulder and to look for the origin of where the visual adventure begins? Two approaches, two separate roads. Which one do you choose?
To Live is Art.
Do you carry a camera with you? Most street photographers and reporters say, “Always have a camera on you”. To wear it on the shoulder as to be able to pull it out like a sword from its sheath in any situation that presents itself and not to deny the opportunity to capture a fragment of reality. They freeze fractions of a second and make everyday life reviewable art – an expression that would otherwise go away, be forgotten and unnoticed. I have a lot of respect for this approach, but I disagree with this idea completely. There is something more than having your eyes glued to a view finder. Something that can be asleep if the camera replaces the care of this most important impulse.
I love to freeze reality. The Camera is my time machine in which I save fleeting moments. These microseconds that otherwise would have passed without sound or a second thought. My passion for freezing moments is, among other things, the fact that I cannot keep up with the pace of my life. Everything happens so fast: situations, people, places – so beautiful and incomprehensible that it is difficult to accommodate them and is hard not to explode with this luggage. I attempt to save them in an entirely different manner.
What do we gain without carrying a camera on us?
Usually, I do not have a camera with me. There is some imaginary burden that makes me unable to fully survive with a camera slung over my shoulder as I feel like I’m at work. As if I had a suit that lightens slightly, but at the same time lets you do something you like. With the camera I suddenly think differently, I look differently. Everything I see, I see through the frame. My eyes begin to look deeper into focus, the stops. Without a camera, I try to get away from it, but at the same time I am devoid of means of expression. This is an uncomfortable situation for me, chosen consciously in my lack of comfort. Because with the camera I would definitely be more expressive. But no. I do something else. I accumulate emotions, write them in myself, absorb the colors, pollen, and then take the camera to my hand and do something else. These moments are there for me to draw inspiration from. To record the most beautiful bits of reality and then to consciously see through their prism to find frames, people, and places that can have this magic in themselves and together we can bring it out into daylight. Then, the camera becomes my interpreter. Something that translates the world from inside of me into the world outside which can be shown in the form of a photo. Photography becomes the sum of emotions, thoughts, and sensations closed in something completely different from the original inspiration, but present in it. In its essence. In its being. Is it visible? Do you feel it?
Thanks to this approach, you can turn a photo into a process, not a short pulse. Do a few shots of what catches our attention without thinking when we are in motion, but otherwise: take advantage of this first impulse for a longer inner journey. A journey where we deliberately reflect on the why of wanting to tell the camera what to say. What is my opinion on this subject? What is my point of view and what will change it? What will bring? What other inspirations will perspire and become proposed to the recipient?
In today’s digital age, many photographers are scaring the popular, ignorant statement where people think that it is enough to simply have good equipment. That it will be creating good photos because of an expensive camera. I am not afraid of such a jab at the photographers. Anyone who deals with this professionally knows that it is not the case that the picture was sharp and correct, nice, candy, everyone knows that every photo is history.
This story begins in us. In our sensitivity. It begins in what filters through our eyes and what he or she consciously wishes to say. Of course, it depends on the recipient whether the idea catches up, but there is something else. Just this process, the journey of the photographer, the artist, who makes his images inviting in this way..
The magic of landscapes and its dream–
The biggest puzzle for me in this shot is the pictures of landscapes. There are some photographers whose landscapes absorb the audience. Kidnapping them almost without his permission and taking him to a completely different world. For me, such pictures are, for example, the scenery of Sebastião Salgado from his ‘Genesis’ project. Like ordinary views, someone would say, yet they have so much harmony in them, so much internal magic, so much something which you cannot name. And yet, it works.
For me it is beauty. Beauty that can be translated with golden proportions, great workmanship, good technology, budget and opportunities, but you can also find them through this internal journey, processed by you yourself. Beauty is a journey for me in and of itself. I find in it the freedom I feel when the wind graces my hair in the wilderness and the feeling of when I don’t know where I will sleep tonight. I believe, however, that beauty must be sought, that it cannot be caught in a cage in the form of snap shots brutally forced from reality. Nor taken between tortillas, a tuk-tuk, or catching the train. I believe that beauty is a dialogue with which we can discover the world before us.
