I am not a photographer, but photographs are an essential element of my life.

They freeze time, motion, and memory.

They distort and contort your grasp of reality, staining memory with a watermark of something that you can spend the rest of your life finding in a box under your bed and straining to remember the rest of.

They are not complete stories. They might not even, as Sally Mann claims, be true stories. But they are invitations. Invitations for you to open and make sense of. Invitations for you to attempt to complete, make meaning out of, or leave exactly as they are.

When you snap a photo, you’re only telling part of the story. The rest, comes later.

LOVE IN MOTION

I was scrolling through my camera roll the other day, as I often do when in need of a bit of inspiration, when I came across the photo above.

I remember taking it. I was crossing 14th Street and 8th Avenue, lost somewhere between Greenwich and Chelsea, adolescence and adulthood, a few months back in New York. It was late July, the air so drenched in water that you practically had to forgo walking and take up the breastroke. The city was an open mouth of hot air, breathing on you, choking you with every movement you made, threatening an early death, all for the sake of saying that you were standing on a street corner in New York.

Which, you know, is worth it.

Especially when you’re twenty-one, falling in love for the first time, not with any one, but with everything.

With this guy and his dinky little lamp, with the symmetry of the crosswalk, with the looming eye of capitalism peering at me from the bank. With the buildings that went on for miles and the feeling of the pavement beneath my feet. With the subway lantern, letting you know that here, right here, the city cracks open and allows you to fall into it’s underworld, it’s secret labyrinth of portals to worlds yet to be known by you—yet to be loved by you. It was everything and nothing and all that I could do to take out my camera and invasively capture the moment, freezing these strangers in time for my own selfish indulgence in that flawed dance of memory.

I looked in my journal from the date of this shot, July 22, and found four little words scribbled at the bottom of the page: “dreams do come true”.

Melodramatic, maybe. But as Anne Carson puts it in this gorgeous piece, I had not been in love before. It was like a wheel rolling downhill. That wheel could have run into a brick wall at full speed and it would have stood right back up to admire the character of it. The redness, the foreignness, the promise of industrial history that is so lacking in the land from which that wheel rolled in from.

What can I say, I was lucky enough to fall in love with a place.

REMEMBRANCE

So that is the first part of a photo, the part that gets inscribed in it’s pixels the moment they first coalesce.

But there’s another part. The rest of it.

For when I look at the shot now, I see it in a broader stroke.

I see that I was standing in the middle of the road at a busy intersection, trying to make art. And isn’t that just a microcosm of what my life is like these days?

Intersections merging and blurring and threatening death while offering transport is exactly what graduating and applying to jobs feels like. I am at the intersection of two worlds, crossing from one right into the other, trying to capture it along the way. I see the motion of the shot, symbolic of New York, but also of twenty-one. Of the years that feel like revolving doors, spinning you around at such velocity that you ache for a shred of stability—something, anything, to hold onto.

I couldn’t have seen all of that back then, but I see it now. It’s perfect now.

I also see that I took this shot not just because I loved the life that was happening before my eyes, but because I loved the life that it promised. It was a microcosm. For there is nothing more New York than seeing people hauling paintings, furniture, mattresses, chairs, and lamps across town, most likely having just picked them up from the sidewalks of the Upper East Side or some thrift shop in Brooklyn. I remember passing gorgeous, expensive, golden mirrors on the sidewalk that were just resting on heaps of black trash bags, begging me to take them home with me.

Life became a very different thing than I had ever known in those moments. It became something to be lived out in the open, for all to see. Photos like this capture an essence of that in ways that I didn’t realize when taking them, but that blink at me like neon signs now.

WISDOM FROM NAN GOLDIN

It’s also, despite what Sally Mann argues, a way to keep your own record. Nan Goldin, one the first photographers I ever took interest in, says, in this interview with Musée Magazine:

“It was very much about not letting anybody else tell me what my experience and my reality was. Keeping a record of what actually happened to me, in order to fight against those forces of conformity and denial.”

“When I was 18, I started to photograph. For years, I thought I was obsessed with record keeping of my day to day life but recently I’ve realized my motivations have deeper roots…”

–Nan Goldin: Hell and Back

She goes on to explain that photographs can become a way to stave off loss, even if they don’t capture or accurately portray what you wish they could have. This photo, this 14th St / 8 Av memory, it staves off loss.

Loss of being twenty-one on a street corner, thanking the brick wall I ran into for being so old and gorgeous. Loss of that initial, brightly-burning love for New York, for people carrying dinky lamps, the chords trailing behind them like wagging tales in the dog-eat-dog world of Manhattan. Loss of that summer day, loss of what came after or just before.

But also resistance. The photo is proof, bagged and filed evidence, of my love. I pull it out when people tell me their own opinions about the city, about my dreams, or when I get anxious about them myself. I only have to look into those frozen pixels to remember all at once why.

And to realize that that why only ever has to make sense to me.

So no, I am a photographer. I don’t know the first thing about it. But when I look at that shot, I do know all of this.

Love, m.

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