Photography: A Calling?
by co-founder of Good Posie, Robb Goodell
Finding your calling in life is a profound thing; and it’s also a thing that is profoundly rare. Many people go their entire lives unaware of what brings them true and lasting joy and purpose — a reason to get up in the morning or to labor late into the evening without tiring.
I can relate. You get up in the morning and spend the day dreaming about going back to sleep. Years and years pass by and pretty soon you’re depressed, bored, and your soul aches. Adulthood is rarely what we dreamed it would be when we were children, and in that disappointment we find ourselves lost wondering what we were actually meant to do here on this planet.We all hunger for meaning and purpose in life and a way to express our true selves.
The question is, can photography be a calling — and is it my calling? I’d like to approach the question this way:
Consider the violinist. The violinist carefully lifts the instrument from its case. Caressing it, she blows off the accumulated dust and gently rests it between chin and her chest. In one hand she holds a short horsehair bow; with the other she grips the wooden neck, fingers pressed across the strings firm enough for them to remember a constant groove. A deep breath and she begins, bow to and fro, weaving a chorus of notes — the cry of the strings united in harmony as she plays. The sound comes from the instrument; the music comes from her heart.
While we in the audience hear the music, she feels it. Hours of training and practice have given her form and poise, but the art, the music, comes from inside. Every stroke is a glimpse into what she was created for — she breathes music — and with it she expresses the deepest longing of her soul.
I struggle to find a better way to describe photography for me.
I don’t mean to be overly romantic about it; and yet there’s a romance to the way shadows bring out the personality of a tree or the way light plays across the face of a child. For me, the camera in my hands is an instrument for worship — a way for me to freeze in time something beautiful that God created and the way the elements illuminate, shape, or distort its nature. I don’t see photographs — I feel them; they vibrate, move, and come alive. I compose them the way Beethoven composed his Fifth (not that I’m a Beethoven, mind you); there’s a sound inside, a vibration that speaks from my soul and provokes me to share it. The camera is simply an instrument through which I can share that voice.
I remember when I first began to share my photography with other people. The art came to me as a way to cope with a deeply painful period in my life. I used the hours of alone time, waiting for long exposure shots, traveling to various spots in the middle of the night, standing beneath the starlight to grieve and speak with God. Before long, people who I’ve never met began to thank me for them — one person commenting that since she and her husband were retired and unable to drive, they missed seeing their city at night and that they were grateful for my art. That struck me deeply.
Like the violinist with her music, photography, for me, is akin to breathing. Along with writing, which is another heart-language for me, it comes from me naturally. If you share with me the understanding that we were meaningfully and purposefully created by a loving and intimately knowing God then you know how profoundly humbling it is to stumble some new way that you can communicate and have people respond in kind. Moreover, to be able to communicate the beauty and grandeur of the universe He created, a new language with which to worship, is entirely emotional and spiritual.
So in that way I would say yes, photography is my calling — except that isn’t. Not entirely, anyway. I would argue that the violinist is not called to be a violinist, but rather she is called and created to worship with music. Likewise, I am not called to be a photographer or a writer — I am called and created to express my worship and my heart through photographs and the painting of images with words. We — all of us — are created purposefully with a language of worship, which is as much a horizontal expression of the value of our Creator as it is a vertical expression of our love toward Him.
If worship is the calling for all of us, the question is what language has our soul been given to speak. I think I’ve found mine. What’s yours?
