Why I Create Photographs
The art of photography has been something of a spiritual practice for me. I don’t wish to discredit the pursuit of creating photographs for creating photographs sake, but I have always been looking for something more from photography than the mere documentation of a place or time. I seek to express who I am at my essence. I strive to communicate emotions. I want to share my own human experience and allow the viewer to feel what I feel when I am standing out there, all alone in these wild places, and maybe even go some way to helping them answer some of the questions that they have about their own lives.
Around six and a half years ago, I reached a place of complete discontentment with my life. A relationship had recently ended and I had begun to feel trapped. I was working a dead-end job in a local supermarket, with no vision or direction for my life, and, to be honest, I had completely lost sight of who I was. I wasn’t content to let this precious life pass me by so I decided to wake up one day and make it one worth living. I had a story inside that was beating at my chest and needed to be released, so I picked up my phone camera and began telling it.
It was never going to be a straightforward story, and it’s one that will probably take me until the end of my days to tell effectively. I’m trying now though, and that’s a big step along this journey of mine. There was a time when all of this was locked away inside. That was incredibly painful. I knew that I had experience and knowledge that could help people, yet I was too fearful of what the world might think about me to open myself up and air it. My fragile ego kept me imprisoned, and held me back for many years.
I guess it goes to show how much I have grown. I’m now in a place where I can talk about the things that once brought unexplainable pain and suffering, whereas I was once a closed book, hiding myself away from the world; often too afraid to be seen, never mind allowing my voice to be heard.
Being a quiet type; people always assume that there is something wrong with you. My main concern when I am busy talking is that if I am talking, then I’m not observing. If I am not observing, then I am not learning, and if I am not learning, then I am not growing. So that, I guess, is the first reason why I create photographs. Photography requires observation. It requires introspection. It requires that I pay attention, and, most importantly, it allows me to learn; about my artistic medium, the world, and about who I am. It allows me to be myself, and to make use of many of the traits and quirks that I have been hiding for much of my life.
If I expressed myself as a child, I would usually be met with shame from the father figures that I had. I was too sensitive, emotional, and open for them. They disapproved of the pure, childlike love that I had for this world, myself, and my mother.
You see, my openness, purity, and innocence reflected back to them everything that they weren’t. I can understand that now as an adult. It’s the case anytime someone makes a criticism about another persons’ character. As a child, of course, it’s difficult to comprehend this, however, and the words of others, especially caregivers, sink in right to our core. I allowed the words of these men to affect me deeply throughout much of my life, and only recently have I started to understand the impact that they had on my development throughout my earliest years.
The world that I lived in through these early years was completely unsafe. The three men that I had around at different stages throughout the first eleven years of my life were all volatile, violent, and wildly aggressive. They were often fuelled by alcohol and drugs and it was difficult to know which version of them I was going to meet. Each one of these would bring out a different version of my mother, too, so, as a child, I was often on guard and in a state of hypervigilance as a way of keeping myself safe. I developed a deep understanding of my own complex emotional landscape as a result of my early experiences. This, I believe, allows me to translate how I’m feeling whilst out in the woodland, or beneath mountains and, therefore, helps me to communicate things through my photographs that words have never allowed me to. These photographs, I believe, are representations of the inner world that I began creating in my moments of dissociation from the real world that I belonged to in my youth.
These early experiences formed the foundations for my deep affinity with Mother Nature and the stillness and silence that she provides. The consistency that she offers was something that was foreign to me, having grown up around complete chaos. As my trust has been growing with this world over the past few years, I have been more and more willing to express my truth and reveal more of what is in my heart, and I am able to make more sense of this during moments of reflection whilst immersed in nature.
The past half decade or so has been a process of unpackaging, understanding, and unlearning much of what I believed about myself and the world around me. It hasn’t been at all easy, and I often wonder why I bothered to embark on this journey to begin with. It would have been much easier for me to stay sat in the comfort of the office that I had fallen into after working in the supermarket. The pull that was, and still is, inside of me to do something meaningful with this life however, proved to be too strong for me to ignore, and it’s what keeps me going when darkness falls along my path.
The practice of photography has brought a much needed sense of catharsis, and, through my creativity, I have been able to express many of the emotions that were repressed inside of me for decades. I feel as though each click of the shutter lightened my heavy burden somewhat, and I feel like a huge space has been created inside of myself which I can now take out into the world and offer to other people, so that they might unload some of their own baggage, too.
It is my belief that the process of photography, and the time that I have spent outdoors in nature, have proven to be two vital components in my journey to heal my relationship with Mother Earth, and the relationship that I had with myself, in turn, has healed and deepened extensively. I have learnt to love the sides of myself that I was once running from and doing my utmost to hide from the world. These parts of myself have been integrated into the version of me that stands here today, and I feel as though this is a much more complete, well-rounded, understanding, empathic, and loving version of myself. In allowing myself to exist fully, I believe that others are encouraged to do so when they are around me, and I have noticed it in many of the conversations that I have been having over the past year or two, in particular.
Recently, I have begun dreaming about a world in which we can all heal, and work towards becoming our best and truest selves. If we all worked towards this healing, and achieving a deeper understanding of self, doesn’t that allow us to further empathise with and understand the people surrounding us? What might that mean for this world? Instead of meeting people with judgment and criticism, maybe we could meet them with the same unconditional love that, through our own creative and healing processes, we have developed within ourselves. Perhaps then we will realise that any shortcomings might not be ‘them’ but the unconscious, unhealed, and unintegrated parts of ‘them’ coming to the surface. The parts of ‘them’ that is, perhaps, a result of their own unhealed trauma, inflicted upon them from their unhealed parents who simply lacked access to the knowledge that we have at our fingertips today.
I offer my own story as an anecdote for what Mother Nature can do for the human spirit and souls on this earth. I act as a mere conduit for what exists out there beyond this vessel that I find myself in. There is, I think, such a thing as a universal consciousness here on earth and through silence, stillness, grounding and creativity, I feel as though I am finding my own way to interpret and articulate the message that Gaia wishes to share with us human beings.
What I believe we need, is more awareness for the healing powers of Mother Nature, and understanding of the deep wisdom that she holds. That can only happen through conversation. It can only happen when people like me and you swallow our pride, face our fears, open up about some of the things that we have lived through that brought us pain and affected our consciousness, and share some of the lessons that we have learnt along our collective way. The lessons that I learn, I’m sure, can help you. The lessons that you learn, I’m sure, can help me. Together we learn. Together, we heal. Together, we create lasting change in this world, and, perhaps, make it a better place to exist in together.