To photograph or not to photograph
Another weekend rambling and celebrating over 2 years of sticking to a single hobby.
It was January 2023. I don’t remember why I bought a new camera.
It wasn’t the first time I had owned cameras and lenses, digital or film. After all, these little machines always felt like toys to me. And just like with an e-reader, a digital watch, a bag with a funky quick release buckle, a jacket with a hidden hood, a tiny flashlight, a spork, and even a traveling trash bag… Owning these “tools” and figuring out how to operate them, in and of itself, always brings me an awful lot of joy. (I’m justifying my god-awful spending habit if you haven’t caught on.)
And so, after dozens of YouTube tutorials and studying the manual like studying for college entrance exams, I was ready to embark on grand walks around my… house and take photographs of anything and everything I saw. Behold, cue dramatic lighting, my toilet, and a customary “I am a photographer now” mirror selfie.
Street
The little overpriced thing of beauty compelled me, chronically homebodied, to venture outside. Compared to the messy but lively Hanoi, where I was born, Singapore felt like a sanitized but rigid concrete jungle, where I oscillate between drawing small rectangles on the bigger rectangular monitor and becoming one with the couch in my square box of an apartment. But as I infiltrated the nooks and crannies of the Singapore heartlands, mind set on taking aesthetic photos of my neighbors’ laundry, my tiny world slowly expanded. Sprawling out of the strict boundaries of the cubes and blocks, lines and edges that shape one of the world’s most organized cities, are colors and curves, googly eyes and wobbly tables, fishtanks and fairy lights. Even within the confines of a materialistic society that prioritizes economic development above all else, people still obstinately refuse to give up on their imperfect yet beautiful expressions of self. And that, I can’t help but love.
Like weeds contorting and bursting through the cracks of well-laid pavement, what remains true and wonderfully ordinary is resilient, but easy to miss. If one doesn’t even bother to look in the first place.
Memories
I often refused to have my photo taken, especially by my mom. She has the habit of posting my pictures on her social media, and I like to have tight control over what parts of my life I choose to share with strangers and my relatives. I read in a book about how lower-income families often don’t have time to spend together, time that’s not spent working or coping with the hardship of life. So when they do gather, it becomes imperative to capture these rare and valuable moments in photographs. It reminded me of my parents, who came from nothing but built a life that afforded me so much comfort and freedom. I now live away from home for the better part of a year, so occasions of reunion are certainly rare, and time, time of course, continues to pass us by. Armed with my camera(s) and a renewed appreciation for photographic records, I took on a new role as the family resident photographer and taker of group selfies.
I still hate when photos of me get shared without my permission (the irony, me, the oversharer). But I know my mother’s favorite social media feature is “On This Day”. And when I'm not around—and one day, when we can no longer explore places together as often as we do now—she’ll still have these memories, preserved in the time capsule that is the photographs we took, to hold and treasure.
Travel
My favorite meme about traveling and posting about the trips is this:
Despite all the gripes I have about social media, in my “private” corner of the internet, I keep in touch with a handful of people and threaten my kampung group of friends to upgrade their cameras and post their travel photos. Internet theorists will probably say that this is my love language; it’s true, I want to be known, and I want to know those I love.
I enjoy both unedited shots taken with a cell phone and the Fujifilm recipe-ed, Lightroom-edited ones taken with cameras made for taking photos. On the one hand, candid snapshots of things as they are, unfiltered. On the other hand, here are the scenes as I see them, and how I feel at that moment in time. My mood is always reflected in the post-processed photos. Seoul was vibrant, Busan chaotic yet warm, the first days in Takayama subdued, later bursting with light, Kamikochi mysterious and ethereal, Kanazawa peaceful and gentle, and Tokyo a mish-mash of everything.
One additional benefit of the editing process is the delayed gratification of getting to share the photos only after the day is over. It’s become a routine to arrive back at our hotels at the end of each day, transfer some hundred shots to my laptop, and batch edit them before bedtime. It allows for the exploring to take the time it takes. When night falls, I get to retrace my footsteps and settle in the comfort of knowing I have lived, and there are new stories that make me, me. And that I get to share them with “the people I’ve chosen, and the ones who’ve chosen me.”
Document
I’ve been relatively obsessed with the idea of life phases as seasons and stories lately. As the seasons pass, one leaves behind versions of oneself. I thought about this as I reminisced about who I used to be, someone who took part in a multitude of social and community activities, and who I’ve become, a homebody who enjoys small gatherings of close friends. This too, the me now, is living through just one season of my life.
In this season, I would like to tell the stories of the things I love so as to honor and preserve them. A picture is worth a thousand words. But it may sometimes still fall short of the ones I long to say. So with my fingers and toes crossed, I hope to share with you who I love, where I love, through clumsy photos and even clumsier words. Soon, I suppose.
Always so much to say, and never concise.
– Zoey