/places
I love photography, but it is a stupidly beautiful art form. In part because it takes so much from me emotionally and mentally, and in part because I know its almost commonplace that I hate it. I put down the camera three years ago - for me it ceased to exist, and consequently with its absence a part of me died.
And here I am now.
God, I do love taking photos - specifically people. People, us, we’re alive, we’re so full of life, of hopes and dreams. We choose to do things, we choose not to. We’re simple, and yet so unreadable. I don't claim to understand people, let alone what humanity is, but I think that through the people I freeze in time on my little camera, I get just a little bit closer to their humanity.
What is humanity? What does it mean for us to be human. Is it in our existences as beings of flesh and blood, is it in our wills, our wants and desires, in our failings and our successes, or in the simple fact that we exist. Or perhaps our humanity is in our understanding of ourselves and the people around us. I know someone out there, someone smarter, wiser, and probably greek and dead has an answer. But it’s hard to see how all that philosophy even matters when we spend most of our lives running from one place to the next, our lives in an ever constant state of motion to tick off the next item on the list.
It’s topic that comes up a lot in conversations between Diane and I. How we’re all so different, even though if you were to scrape it all off, we’re all merely the same kind of flesh and blood. Shylock had it right, as much as I hate bringing up the bard, that if I were to prick you, and if you were to prick me, would we both not bleed the same blood. I wax poetic, and this is getting out of hand - a common problems one finds themselves running into when talking about our own localised positions in life, and our even limited roles in the grander scheme of things. It is hard to look at ourselves as a collective and see what makes us the same when more often than not we’re so willing to take up arms against one another.
But it made some sort of sense when she said that perhaps our humanity lies in the way we live, in our belongings splayed across the spaces we inhabit, in the items we keep as memories of times we’ve lived through. It is in the things we touch, in the way we walk across a room, god/spirituality/whatever higher power claims to exist is in the little things and within those little things we find ourselves laid bare. This has to be the kindest way of looking at ourselves. It allows us to be kind to ourselves. Your mess is no worse than mine. It is in the confined space of our own little rooms that we are truly all the same. Yes, I’m aware that this thought is problematic, that there are people out there without a space to call their own due to circumstances beyond their control. But perhaps in a kinder world, one where we are all afforded our own spaces, I do truly believe that there is nothing that brings people closer to someone else’s humanity than being in their space.
Thus, bringing us to empty spaces. What of newly empty spaces, of bare rooms, of a new house, a new room. When do we truly move into such a space and when do we make it our own? When I moved into my new room, it took me a while to fully settle in. Think something in the ballpark of about three months, and there’s still points in time now where I don't feel like this is truly my space. It was only when I started putting up things on the walls that it truly felt lived in, that I really in fact did exist in this space.
So when a newly empty space opened up, I was intrigued, call it an odd curiosity and a desire to see what a reset looks like. It was so void of life, so clinical and clean. Someone lived there before, I knew this particular someone in question, and now they’re not here anymore. But the space they inhabited still exists, it still smelt of them, if that makes any sense. In our heads, it’s still their room, someone will move into their room. There’s probably no point in thinking too much about the inevitability of changes in life, I doubt any of us have much control over all of that. But this now empty space offered so much in lack of anything of importance. A new space, an empty space, even if temporarily as such, it offered so much. How does one interact with this space? It wasn’t mine. Right now it didn’t belong to anyone, but for those two hours I spent in it, it was alive, it was lived in. Lived in by me and Diane. We lived in it, and we brought some of our humanity to it. I brought in my notebook of thoughts, we brought in our cameras, she brought in an apple, a chair, an odd Christmas bouquet. We lived in it, if only for a little while.