He Wasn’t a Photographer, He Just Took Photographs
He never called himself a photographer.
I’ve heard his friends ask him to stop being modest about his skills with a camera, but I don’t think it was ever about modesty.
“I know that there is a lot I don’t know. Besides, I would never do this full-time,” he’d say, “That would ruin it for me.”
He clicked photographs, but he was not a photographer.
He loved landscapes. I have seen the tallest tower in his city from his balcony on the fourth floor, from his friend’s balcony on the 28th floor, from the well-paved road next to his neighborhood Subway and from the creek he loved to sit by when he needed to look at his murky reflection. I have seen it photoshopped into spirals that sent my head into a tizzy and I’ve seen it in monochrome because ‘some things are better in black and white’.
He loved taking photos of the sky. The sky, I began to notice through his photographs, would never stop mysteriously being a trifle different every day. While sometimes it looked like an angry sky God’s fleet of ivory soldiers being hastened to war, sometimes it looked like Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, a desperate throng clamoring behind their leader, confused by the change from slavery to servitude. But his favorite prophet was Mohammed, not Moses.
On the last day of the Holy month of Ramadan, he took a panoramic shot of the final prayer at the mosque before Eid, the sky looked as though it was finally at peace, resting, cloudless.
When he showed me raging skies, laden with rain clouds, I would feel sorry for him and the weather that his part of the world was about to witness.
“Are you crazy?” he’d ask me, and I knew he meant every resounding syllable of shock, “Rainy skies are the BEST!”
I didn’t know how to love the rain, but he showed me how every sky was exquisite, grey skies dabbed with slight purple tones and the endless ways in which the sun could use magenta to paint each sunset.
He once showed me a photograph that he clicked before it was edited, processed and made to look magical. It captured a dilapidated cottage along the stretch of a lake, almost entirely surrounded by Ghaf trees. The midnight blue sky was speckled in salt like grains and the lake below was dark and still.
He then showed me the same photograph, post editing. The starry night sky was mirrored perfectly in the lake. All that was missing was a young fawn sipping water from there, or I would have sworn that he had shown me a figment of my imagined heaven.
“So you just, like, faked the reflection of the stars?” I asked him, a little uneasy about the heavy hand of editing.
He sighed at my lack of knowledge on how a picture is captured and created to be it’s best. He then proceeded to patiently explain to me how the reflection was present, but the editing simply made it a lot clearer.
“So it looks like how it would look in real?” I asked, a mix of awestruck and intrigued.
“Yes,” he smiled.
But he wasn’t a photographer.
Snapchat was of course a favorite app of his. Most of his snaps were of his silly (albeit adorable) feline and the various interesting looking food he happened to sample. I used to tease him that he took so many videos and pictures of Winnie to watch women croon over them. His love for Winnie was genuine, though.
“Why aren’t you more active on instagram?” I always pressed him.
He shrugged. “I only put out my best.”
I was always amused by how little he thought was worthy to show the world.
And yet our distant lives from distant countries united over pixels on our screens. His well aligned, artistic, unique shots and my distorted, blurry attempts to show him how pretty the moon looked on certain nights.
I disliked that he didn’t call himself a photographer when I believed with all my good heart that he was a gifted man. At first, I used to argue, but the words were lost on him.
“Teach me something about photography,” I said to him one day. I was tired of speaking and writing to someone who understood things differently. Didn’t someone once say that a good photograph was worth a thousand words?
“Alright, the first thing you will have to learn is to take a good photograph of yourself,” he replied, to my absolute horror. “Now I don’t want any of those selfies you love, show me a good complete shot with the right lighting against a neat backdrop.”
“Are you kidding me?!” I asked him. “There is no way I am gonna do that!”
I thought I would be taught ways to finally master how to take a good picture of the moon, or even those landscapes that he loved. But he asked me to take my own photo which everyone knows I hate.
He says he isn’t a photographer. I don’t believe him, but I finally understand how hard it can be to look at yourself, and actually see what the world does.
