Why I photograph what I can't remember
The best images came from what I could not hold on to.
Most of what I experience disappears. The meals, the conversations, the light on a particular morning. Gone within days, sometimes hours. And yet, some of those moments return as images. Not planned. Not composed. They surface on their own, weeks or months later, as if they had been waiting.
I have spent years building systems to hold on to what passes through. Notebooks, daily logs, archives of references and highlights. They work, to a point. But the images I am most proud of did not come from any system. They came from something I could not hold on to.
Rick Rubin writes in The Creative Act: “We begin with everything: everything seen, everything done, everything thought, everything felt, everything imagined, everything forgotten.” The word that stays with me is forgotten. Not remembered. Not archived. Forgotten.
I think the strongest work does not come from what you planned to capture. It comes from what you could not forget. And two years ago, something happened that proved it.
