on wanting to be the one to take the photographs

I’ve been working on an essay for about a month. I’ve done the ‘easy’ part: the first twenty thousand words. The essay will end up being only four thousand. I’m about halfway through the material I want to cover.

I think of the way I work as comprehensive. I want to get it all down so I’m not missing anything. When I begin, I write in a flood without holding back, and about halfway through I start doubling back on myself. Doubt creeps in, I start procrastinating. I reread and edit, set down what I’m working on and refuse to pick it up for days. The second half looms, feeling for some reason a lot harder than the first. At this point, I’ll have another idea: for a different essay, for a chapter in my novel, for my website, for a painting, or an urge to clean the house. What I start fails to be comprehensive because it isn’t finished.

Finishing projects is one of three values I’ve chosen for myself recently, when a friend of mine suggested the exercise: Finishing projects, Ecology and Boldness. I find these values are working their way into my life with very little conscious effort. I have been finishing projects (small ones) and when I do, I feel a huge surge of gratification and satisfaction along with a sense of time opening up. I understand that I cannot do everything, that I must choose what is important and endeavour to finish it. While this is limiting, it’s also quite comforting.

I know what I need to do to finish the essay. I have a list of small, actionable steps. Making that list was a step in itself. I really just need to keep going, to build momentum again after the middle of the road pause (best to skip the pause at all if you can).

I recently discovered the work of writer Melissa Febos (Girlhood, Abandon Me, Body Work, Whip Smart). and read all four of her books in one weekend. I excitedly await the publication of her next book The Dry Season. In an essay published by the Sewanee Review (and a chapter in her book Body Work) she writes:

Over the years, I’ve come to look forward to the point in my own writing at which continuing seems both incomprehensible and loathsome. That resistance, rather than marking the dead end of the day’s words, marks the beginning of the truly interesting part. That resistance is a kind of imaginative prophylactic, the end of ideas that I already had when I came to the page. The exhaustion of narrative threads that were already sewn into me by other sources of varying nefariousness or innocuity. It is on the other side of that threshold that the truly creative awaits me, where I might make something that did not already exist. I just have to punch through that false bottom.

I have been thinking about this idea of the false bottom a lot, and it’s helping, urging me to dig deeper, to stay when it isn’t comfortable to. I’ve been through this process before, many times. I know what waits on the other side, the reward and payoff from all that hard work. When I paint, I know I’ve reached the mid-point by what I’m thinking: I can’t do this. I don’t know what I’m doing. This isn’t any good. I’ve learned (in painting) to see these thoughts as a signal that I’m working in the right direction. I’ve never painted anything good without this litany of thoughts cropping up at some point. I’ve learned to follow them with: You’ve reached the hard part. Keep going. Trust yourself. You’re supposed to feel this way.

Writing is trickier, maybe because it’s closer to my heart. More is riding on what I succeed in getting down. But it’s the same course, the same way through. Eventually I’ll learn: Keep going. Trust yourself. You’re supposed to feel this way. I look forward to looking forward to this point, like Melissa Febos, knowing the resistance is there to drive me deeper.

The essay I’m working on has a lot to do with photography — among other things: immigration, girlhood, belonging — and the ways it has changed in the twenty years or so since I first picked up a camera. From the first black and white images I shot on film with the heavy, manual Canon TX my mom gave me to the phone camera that comes with me everywhere now and which I take for granted. The image at the top of this post is one I took on a multi-day boat trip in Halong Bay, Vietnam, from a 24 exposure roll of black and white film I shot on that same Canon TX, the heavy, bulky, beautiful machine I lugged all around India and South East Asia in 2009.

Digging through the archives, thousands of images catalogued by year and place, I wonder if I’m an archivist more than I am a photographer. Being an archivist would explain the desire for comprehension and the way I approach a subject obsessively from each of my preferred mediums: photography, painting, and writing. I chase certain subjects but all the while I’m really trying to pin myself down. Who am I? What am I? Artist? Photographer? Archivist? Scribe? I remember a vivid dream I had in 2017. I sat taking dictation at the head of a table full of men, each scrambling to tell me their story of the desert. The table existed outside of time, in the dream realm perhaps — some of the men were young, some were dead. I had known them all, but not in this life. I was a scribe and the men’s stories became mine as I wrote them down. I absorbed them, lived them, laid each story over my own story of each man like a double exposure: two images laid over top of one another. Double exposures made from two photographs are fascinating to create, you never know which parts of each image will stand out in the final print, which shapes or highlights or shadows will be enhanced. In the scribe dream, the desert was the central thread, the part of the exposure that never changed. Of course, the desert changes, but the ever-shifting nature of it is hard to pin down, and its dogged persistence, across time and space, serves the illusion.

I used to take photographs of people, now I rarely do. I used to think of myself as a documenter, documenting places and people and times. The woman in the photograph above is from Israel. I liked her. I enjoyed the sound of her voice, the easy way she held her body. She was quiet and contained (like me) and wrote in a journal (like me) in amongst a group of more extroverted individuals. She neither bowed to them nor forced her way of being onto them. She didn’t apologise or explain herself. She simply was: quiet, and beautiful and reserved. I know myself better now than I did in 2009 at 23 and 24. I longed for a feminine role-model I could see myself in (around my age, quiet, travelling, writing, on the water). Someone who could help me know how to be. I don’t know why they were so few and far between. Perhaps I was looking in the wrong places. I wish I could remember her name.

We shared a taxi with the Isaraeli woman, a Russian woman and an Italian man (a couple) to the dock, boarded a rickety tourist boat, and motored out into the bay. There were maybe twenty of us on board, and perhaps twenty other boats in the same style. The sheer, towering peaks defining Halong Bay outnumbered the tourists and their boats. Soon the Jurassic landscape won out and enveloped us, and the other boats disappeared from sight. We stretched out in the sun on the upper deck of the boat, smoking and talking about our lives. I felt like we’d gone back in time, leaving the city and the shore and any sight of civilisation behind, but from the upper deck I noticed the trail of trash in the wake of our boat. Though the South China Sea appeared remote and pristine, it was full of everything we humans no longer wanted. We would not swim as the tour guide had promised us we would, a tactic to lure us onboard initially. The driver would not stop the boat for it, simply waved an arm over the array of waste in the water as though asking why would we want to. I still wanted to get in the water, but I didn’t. I didn’t know yet that this was an urge that would define me later, a trail of want I should have followed sooner. I wish someone had told me that the small voice repeating within me was a sufficient role model. That I want to get in, I want to get in, I want to get in, was a refrain worth paying attention to.

I’ll leave you with an essay fragment with more to follow as I get my writing act together.

I wanted to be part of my brother’s surfing stories. I wanted to go on long treks barefoot over gorse-studded paddocks under hot sun or in spitting rain and cold wind. I wanted to suit up and get in. I wanted to catch waves on empty beaches where no one but my brother and his friends would know what I could do. I wanted to see the back of a wave from above, the inside of a wave from below. I wanted to be pummelled and pounded in the white-water and come up whooping for joy. I wanted to get warm again on the long trek back and roll a cigarette while the car heater warmed up my still-wet hands. I wanted salt in my hair and sand in my toes. If I couldn’t surf, at least I wanted to go with them. I wanted to be the one to take the photographs.

Thank you for reading these musings. More from me soon. xx