Arresting Vision
My uncle first showed me a book of photographs by Raghu Rai when I was in high school. I remember being completely mesmerized as we turned the pages, each image arresting complete attention. I had received a camera as a gift that year and this was his way of teaching me how to really see things. How there is extraordinary potential in the mundane even sordid that makes up life. Rai took pictures of people in settings that we would not ordinarily consider noteworthy but what he saw through the lens transformed it into the sublime.
That was the story of every photograph in the book. How the essence of the moment was captured to such a degree of perfection that you'd never look at the scene in real life the same again. And yet as I tried to find the magic in ordinary things, inspired by that book, I came to realize how extraordinarily difficult it was. Rai seemed to have eyes that opened up the scene in a different dimension that it did not ordinary mortals. I loved reading this essay about him. His passing brought back memories of a time long gone and how my uncle had used his photographs to teach me how to see and feel about the world around me. He talks about this notion in this interview.
I feel God has installed the biggest computer in every one of us. And this most terrific, unbelievable computer’s storage space can be expanded to anything. It’s a storehouse of ideas, pictures, sounds. What is bad about this big computer is that we can’t reformat it. When your sensor is freed of influences it will reflect something that is refreshing and honest. And creativity lives beyond ideas, concepts and philosophies. Philosophies are born and realized later. First it’s a moment when you make yourself available to the situations mentally, spiritually and physically. That’s when the whispers happen, when nature begins to speak, when the signals from daily life begin to rejuvenate you and tell you another kind of story. That is the process that a creative person lives for. So when you are going through a moment of revelation, if you have the ability to click simultaneously, that is the magical moment you’ve caught.
In all the years of me taking pictures with that first camera upto today, there may have been only a couple that truly captured the spirit of what I had experienced in the moment when the picture was taken. The rest is just flat and devoid of that magic I first experienced leafing through that book full of photographs by Raghu Rai. While I will never meet the bar, I feel fortunate that I learned very in life what it is to be extraordinarily good at seeing the world.
That was the story of every photograph in the book. How the essence of the moment was captured to such a degree of perfection that you'd never look at the scene in real life the same again. And yet as I tried to find the magic in ordinary things, inspired by that book, I came to realize how extraordinarily difficult it was. Rai seemed to have eyes that opened up the scene in a different dimension that it did not ordinary mortals. I loved reading this essay about him. His passing brought back memories of a time long gone and how my uncle had used his photographs to teach me how to see and feel about the world around me. He talks about this notion in this interview.
I feel God has installed the biggest computer in every one of us. And this most terrific, unbelievable computer’s storage space can be expanded to anything. It’s a storehouse of ideas, pictures, sounds. What is bad about this big computer is that we can’t reformat it. When your sensor is freed of influences it will reflect something that is refreshing and honest. And creativity lives beyond ideas, concepts and philosophies. Philosophies are born and realized later. First it’s a moment when you make yourself available to the situations mentally, spiritually and physically. That’s when the whispers happen, when nature begins to speak, when the signals from daily life begin to rejuvenate you and tell you another kind of story. That is the process that a creative person lives for. So when you are going through a moment of revelation, if you have the ability to click simultaneously, that is the magical moment you’ve caught.
In all the years of me taking pictures with that first camera upto today, there may have been only a couple that truly captured the spirit of what I had experienced in the moment when the picture was taken. The rest is just flat and devoid of that magic I first experienced leafing through that book full of photographs by Raghu Rai. While I will never meet the bar, I feel fortunate that I learned very in life what it is to be extraordinarily good at seeing the world.
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Art