Choose to invent

Some musings on photography and life in the aftermath of the strongest earthquake in Italy since 1980.

Recently Joey from Joeyfully Stated wrote a kind comment to my post. I mean, she does that often but this one made me think more than usual. She wrote: “I can’t tell if you only go to beautiful places or if you only photograph them beautifully.” My thought immediately went to my recent photos of our messy flat – but those are kinda nice too. 😀

I have saved the following quotation, also recently:

To invent … is to choose.
—Henri Poincaré

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Since I first started taking photographs, there has been a quotation in the back of my mind, saying how a photographer is only as good as the selection of photos s/he lets others see. Today I tried to track it down but no luck. If anybody knows which quotation I mean and who said it, please, step up. (I found many others instead. They are down there.)

This is all there is, really – a selection. (Even though Italy doesn’t take away any, and Slovenia neither.) I tend to select photos that would please me if I saw them on another’s page. This reminds me of how I try on clothes in a shop: I only look from the neck down and imagine seeing the item on a person approaching.

So I’ve been choosing all my life: things that I wish I’d say, write, wear, photograph; not to take them over as a vulture or a vampire now that they are done, but to be there when they were born. What you choose, you become.

It started with sticking posters, then own photographs, then a mish-mash of inspiration on the wall.

Spoil all the walls with sellotape marks.
—Sachin Kundalkar, “Cobalt Blue”

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The following is something I’m still learning to grip, the four edges and what they can do:

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.
—Garry Winogrand

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And this is how my blog feels and how it could be labelled if it really had to be: a blog for anyone who really sees.

Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.
—Paul Strand

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The last quotation below captures how living in Italy feels today, after a series of earthquakes, ending with the strongest which I could feel as well, or so it felt to me (we are in central Italy as well, but on the other side, the west coast). This morning I mentioned a swaying sensation to amore, who felt nothing and called it anxiety.

The reminder is that we are here on borrowed time, no matter what we do. So we might as well have that glass of wine, an evening in, pizza with fries, a laugh at own preposterity at playing the photographer:

You don’t take a photograph. You ask, quietly, to borrow it.
—Unknown

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The following photographs were all taken on the same June day in Roma. How eternal it is, really? (They enlarge upon contact.)

Via del Mascherone

Piazza di Pietra

Piazza di Pietra

Campo de’ Fiori

Campo de’ Fiori

Giordano Bruno, Campo de’ Fiori

Temple of Hadrian, Piazza di Pietra

Foro Romano (Roman Forum)

Photo: a © signature mmm production