kulturbrille:amanuensis

For the first time this year, ill, a shredded throat and a febrile haze filling up most of today. But there was redemption, despite all the unfulfilled moments and disillusionment; there was Annie Leibovitz. If you were there, among all of us voyeurs, yes, it was me, it was me hacking and tearing through the documentary, as through the tears, defying a deflated, fibrillating heart to savour each moment of photographic apotheosis. At one moment I blinked, lost, unsure of who I was, and where I was, mimicking the act of photographing, being there in the moment.

I outdo myself. There are decades to come, years to come, a day when I will have family, shoeboxes full of photographs, not just juvenile snapshots, each of them a story that isn’t just a one-liner. Armed with a dogged determination to make something out of so little at all, I should take on a little ambition, if only to warm the chilly inside of my still faintly incandescent vessel. There was once a time when I went forth - to New York, through alleyways, into paroxysms - where everywhere I looked, I was framing, when I filed envelopes of negatives and learnt how to be non-existent behind the camera. There was once, if I might clumsily explain, when I found that space between a macro and a full-length portrait on a 50mm lens, a space available only to those who knew how to press a shutter and not run away.

But you had to have been there to understand why it was the best cathartic experience I’ve had all year. It was searingly authentic, masterfully brief, full of reminders of what it takes to make meaning out of the pernicious present. There is no counting of the hours, but only a measuring of the years, as perspective is brought to bear on the most salient moments of a life. And, as silent testimony, there are photographs, ineluctable, each a sudden, piercing, intrusive reality that one had to force back to stay in one’s seat. It became a universe within a single narrative, all those lives, all those things, ideas, emotions, fate, all splashed across a screen and pointing to the one central theme.

Perhaps now, even as the I contemplate a half-successful but increasingly bland life, even as I scale back the dreams and fears that hold me down each day, I remember what it felt like to become one with the lens; one with the world that I so longingly gazed at and poorly captured, in my own way. But there are no regrets; for even though every hope and every desire was impossibly far-fetched, silly, far too elaborate and outlandish for its own good, when it was made real, it was…good. Sometimes it takes longer than we think, that’s all. I see, you.