In the summer of 2014, I was travelling Britain by myself for a month. And one of the places that I had stayed in was the city of Bath, a beautiful location where buildings are the colour of scrumptious caramel. When the sun set, everything would slow down. You would sit on the grass in the centre of the city and admire how the colour of the caramel-like buildings would change, and wonder how the hell you ended up here.
Then one day I woke up early in the morning and went out to the roads of Broad Street, which was where I was staying. I looked around and I noticed how everything is stationary. It was cold, and clean, and clear. It was the freshest and purest of mornings, and there was nobody on the street but me. Nothing was distracting me from admiring and tasting the sheer beauty that this city held and I wanted so badly to hold onto that moment, because it was perfect.
I’m sure everyone had moments like this. You would look at something so perfect that you feel an instant urge to treasure it in any way you can. And I think in moments like these, we are all tempted to dash out the camera or phone or iPad or whatever from our bags and experiment the angles as to which one could best capture this moment. And there is nothing wrong with that. Except that they never work.
That’s the thing about photos that always bothers me. They are simply never as satisfying. They never live up to the high expectation of reality. Whether it be a photo of a breathtaking sunset, of the shimmering stars at night, of magnificent skyscrapers, or a selfie with an old friend that you love being with, photos fail to capture the wholeness of the scene.
Even so, we take photos all the time these days. With rapid development of technology, all you need to take a pretty good photo is a decent phone, and with that photo-taking has become so much more common. And as I said, there is nothing wrong with that. After all, photos are the best way to materialise the transience of the moment we are living in.
But we have to understand the limited nature of photographs. Photos cannot replace the experience itself. Travel does not equal photos, memories do not equal photos, and neither do friendships and youth equal photos. Photo taking is everyone’s attempt to materialise the intangible so that we can look back on it some day and smile at the memory it entails. But what have we got to smile for, if we forget to live truly in that beautiful moment that we so wish to treasure for the future?
Photos are inevitably incomplete because they can never capture the wholeness of the experience. Hence, what makes any photo complete is our attitude of savouring the experience, of savouring the moment. When you face a scene so good that makes you say “hell this is amazing,” or when you are with a friend you absolutely love, live in it. Photos can wait. Breathe it in and devour it. Such attitude is the key that allows photos to serve their real purpose, of allowing us photographers to look at the photo in the future and remember what it felt like to be staring down that flawless morning of Broad Street. Of allowing us to remember what it felt like when you were on top of that hill by the windy rocky fence looking down at where you just climbed from. Or what you and your friend shared and laughed and chatted about.
Those moments, and not the photos, are what make us storytellers. And that’s what life should be about. Life should be about making stories and memories and not about leaving empty photos, where we smile for the sake of photo-taking and fool ourselves afterwards that the smile was genuine. It should not be about coming across a stunning scene, and instantly grabbing your camera so that you can share it with your friends on Facebook. Live in the moment that you so wish to treasure. Make a story. Be a storyteller. And my god, how amazing it would be for all of us to be storytellers.
