By Stevie White
It’s been a while…a long while. I finally sat down and started looking at my photography work again, to edit, post-process, and try and make sense of what I’ve been observing. It took me a few weeks to really grasp what I’ve been doing:
Photography has always been thrust into my life whether I wanted it or not, and it’s been a dance learning her moves over the past 15 years. Aside from growing up around photographers, I passed over from US Navy photojournalist and combat camera operator into a “fine art” photographer. I suppose it’s not that crazy when you hear stories of how traumatic horrors drove others into the depths of the Art world. Either way, I wouldn’t have seen it coming. Oh, by the way, I use “fine art” as a blanket term to loosely explain my reasoning some of the blatant disregard and unwavering faithfulness to photography’s “rules” in my own images. Non-traditional also works.
When I lived in Tokyo as a student, I went out night after night after night and put the hours in like I did in the service, looking to break out of old habits and develop my own style. Treating the world around me as “an event that needed coverage”. It didn’t matter if I was shooting digital or film, if it was night or day, raining or sunny, or if I was drunk or sober (preferably drunk), color or black and white, I was dedicated to finding that one image. Around the time I was about to leave Japan for the second time, I unexpectedly created that one image—the one I had held in the periphery of my subconscious for the past few years through all this self-training. This was the image that symbolized my “graduation” out of the documentary/street photography bubble (below). I finally created the image I saw in my mind’s eye, expressed from reality, using my camera as the tool. It was some sort of unexpected success. A perfect storm under the worst circumstances (maybe a short story on it later?), after years of literal blood, sweat, and tears, however, I did it. It wasn’t a tangible goal, which makes the sense of accomplishment that much more alluring.
For the past few years, my method and understanding of photography has been shifting focus yet again. At first when I moved back from Japan, I continued to shoot like I was on a mission, producing solid work almost daily. Individual folders for each day’s work. I felt like a foreigner in my home country (still do). Everything had shock value. It was easy. I got it, but it got old, quick. The pandemic was in full swing and everything seemed to be shutting down and falling apart.
I wanted my entire understanding of photography to fall apart too: my techniques, my theories and ideas, my lessons and workshops, my obsessions, my shortcomings, all of it. If I could conceptualize and ultimately capture a photo, what happens when I don’t interfere? I wanted to forget everything and strip away the bullshit: back to the basics. A fresh set of eyes. I felt I was getting in the way of my main goal with photography: to capture universal emotional resonance in the in-between and overlooked moments as well as the peak ones. The truths I photograph are outside of me. Yet, the images should feel candid with something “deeper”. I had to somehow remove myself from the equation of taking the photo to get there. How else could many comprehend the perspective of one?
The last little push of inspiration was from a recently-gifted copy of Daido Moriyama’s “Farewell, Photography.” His work always shocks my psyche. I decided I needed to let my own process dismantle somehow if I wanted to get to the next level...
So I kept shooting, taking, and creating, but never really looked at the photos, never questioning why I took what I took. I kept compiling thousands and thousands of images to my hard drive as they slowly collecting digital dust. Like no one would ever see them. A balance of complete garbage and genius. Even though the “act” of photography couldn’t be completed by someone else (or even myself) viewing the photo, it felt right. I felt giving the photos more time than usual, from the time it took to create them to letting them incubate, rot and spoil even, would let me come back to them neutrally, even as one of you would. I’d take my camera with me and usually, sometimes, and never press the shutter button. You could gamble crypto on it. It’s Schrödinger’s photo: if you take the photo and no one sees it, did you really take the photo?
I wanted to capture every single imaginable possibility of a photo, but in that impossibility, eventually, the frequency and quantity of images I took began to decline. I was more interested in observing the world around me. Knowing when to shoot versus when to observe. How can I be more present to be more aware of those passing moments? I’d have the camera with me, but just focus on being present without letting the camera get in the way. Lens cap on, turned off. Often times we see photos we wish we could take if we had only brought our camera. I watched them pass by one after another like clouds on a Spring day. I was trying to quit being a photographer. A fucking poser with nice gear. Malpractice even. By then stepping outside of my usual self, I could try to figure out why I had the impulse to photograph what I wanted to photograph. Why do certain photographic memories want to remain?
At one point, I stopped shooting pictures altogether, cameras stayed in the bags.
In order to completely unlearn, I realized I had to let it all go. I wasn’t about to sell off my gear, but I had to let go of my grandiose career goals and dreams. To willingly let the “competition” win in my head. To let go of my favorite photos. To lose my obsession. To drown in a sea of hypothetical and unadorned failure. I felt the sting of so many missed incredible and beautiful images. And then I forgot it all. I wanted to reorient my mind to look at the Art of photography as if I discovered it yesterday. Why was it so alluring before? Just walking around with the camera wasn’t it, but the journey and the search, the search for a moment in the future worth preserving in the past. I wasn’t about trying to take the best photo, or even if I took the photo or not. Was it really me interested in taking the photo or something the camera inspired in me? The camera merely brought me to that place.
My own “dismantling” was also underway and I didn’t realize it.
Paralleled with my personal life, I was exhausted battling with serious depression on top of real-life issues one after another.
Readjusting over and over again to a constantly-changing American culture was both draining and intimidating.
I had to I let my love for photography get drowned out and drown in the real world’s bullshit. Get used to it all and find where I fit. Sink down to the bottom. Let’s see how deep. Shit-filled lungs. Let it die. Live as a non-photographer. It felt like a weight off my chest. I’m not defined by the word “photographer,” anyhow. It’s a worn-out title these days. The camera is just a tool. It’s just a method. It translates what my eyes see and how I want you to see it.
This personal convexity experiment with photography inevitably bled into my neglect of other artistic endeavors; I quit writing, I quit drawing, I quit playing guitar, I quit expressing myself so much. It worsened by extending into my self-care. I exercised less frequently, socialized less, silently spiraled off-track without a moments notice. Full-swing depression ensued. I canceled more plans, lost track of days, unfinished and growing to-do lists, neglected whole projects, gave up on more, watched it all snowball downhill.
Sometimes self-love is a lot more work than being in a relationship with whole other person when you’re fighting your own condition. I hadn’t realized how depression seeped back in and slowly killed off my passions one-by-one. Choking out my motivation. I even explored the weightlessness of completely giving up my hopes and dreams. However, while suspended at the bottom of the pool of shit, staring up at the twisting and turning refractions of light, I realized that was the reason I kept shooting. It’s in my mind, but it’s that little slice of light. It’s the same as that warm and overflowing beautiful light I’ve felt inside during deep meditation and mushroom trips. It’s an overwhelming sense of love, beauty, wonder, excitement, anything you can imagine, and happens just with a simple glimpse.
The answer seemed obvious to me now: I keep doing this because I want you to see this beauty I see too, even if it’s from the bottom of a pool of shit.
I can remove as many of my passions, obsessions, dreams, goals, likes, dislikes, hates, and failures from myself and let myself willing sink down to the bottom of the proverbial pool of shit. Quitting one, or all, of my passions was giving up on myself. It wasn’t the goals that kept me driving to that one image so much as it was the process of unfolding new parts of myself along the way. Honestly, and you can call me an asshole narcissist, but I felt like I figured it out and got bored, so self-destruction and reinvention was the default. It always has been. The thing specifically with photography though, is the method isn’t just looking and reacting to what’s around me, but a reaction of the self.
Whatever impulses that turn into images and photographs are not only impressions of my outside world, but also of the world I’ve got going on inside. It’s sunny for one person and too bright for another. If I take away part of who I am, which by and large I’d define as “observer”, by extension I began to quit being myself. I quit observing the world around me through my methods of expression and interpretation. I then came to realize just how deeply ingrained photography was in my life.
So here I am, not knowing if I’m grasping that aforementioned “next level”, but it certainly feels different from before, grasping at it at least. Way less formal. Way more comfortable. A broke-in pair of sweatpants.
When I go out shooting, I don’t give a shit if you see my camera or not. Look directly at my lens, I’ll still make the photo. Maybe you’ll get to see the image, maybe we won’t. The camera stays by my side, with the lens cap probably lost. The search is still there, but with a less-formed intangible goal of self-growth and preservation and a more-thrilling chase. The intensity of existence itself is often more than enough reason to press that shutter button, and the cool part is that it keeps proving that we are all still here.
Enjoy some “new work” below.
