 |
|
During the ten-week course, my camera was almost always with me. In a desperate attempt to realise some talent that I may or may not have, I was striving to document, to *capture* every fleeting image. I found that my technique improved, as did my understanding of light and cameras, and I began to approach all situations as photographic opportunities, often eagerly capitalising upon them. Being to able to walk down a street waving a camera in front of me was not only an invitation for speculative would-be-muggers, it was also a method of circumventing my own shy disposition, a way to exploit subjects, ripe for the bagging. Long after I had finished the course, I was still lugging my camera around, and I realised that I expended more energy *capturing* events than actually *experiencing* them. I began to feel akin to the herds of primary-colour-clad herd tourists, armed with camcorders, like some form of voyeuristic proboscis extending from their eye sockets. The kind of creature that spends their entire holiday *recording* their holiday at the expense of actually having a holiday. I stopped taking photographs. Most of the time.
During August 1999, I was travelling in northern Turkey, to get myself into the path of the solar eclipse. For a day or so, my friends and I chilled out in the tiny Black Sea village of Amasra, a beautiful labyrinth of alleyways between mosques and Ottoman houses, perched on a precarious coastal promontory. One morning, while exploring the trinket shops, two of us stumbled across a semi-covered village market. It was just off a street we had walked down dozens of times, but somehow we had missed the dark, tin-roofed shed, where dozens of tanned and wizened women in patterned skirts and headscarves were squatting, peddling their home grown courgettes, chilies, tomatoes and olives. I stood there gaping, a cultural alien from another continent. There was something about magnificent about the moment, the scene, the manifestation - it was literally *momentous*, animated still, like a flicker of recalled dream. I was caught in the moment, the composition of the sunlight, the intense morning heat, the bustling noise and the weird un-sea-like air of the Black Sea, which mingled with the scent of my own sweat, the buckets of feta and olives and the olfactory soup of fresh fruit and vegetables. There was not a thing quaint, or even annoyingly touristic about the situation. I felt invisible, the Turkish babooshkas didn't pay us a bit of notice. Amasra isn't on any tourist trails, more of a quiet seaside resort for people living inland, so perhaps we seemed as 'other' as the families who roared in their crammed automobiles.
|
|
|
Contents | Marrow | Freezone | Detritus | Catacombs Sign
up for our Announcements
List |
