As is tradition in my family I used to love photography. In my late teens, I lost touch with the hobby, but for nostalgia’s sake, saved a 1970s 35mm film camera when we cleaned out my grandparents’ apartment after their passing. It collected dust for years, but I’ve started to shoot photos with it.
Walking around with the camera makes me pay attention to details: A dandelion sprouting from a crack in the wall, a balcony furnished like a living room, a few old folks looking as carefree as children while playing cards over beers.
Passing through the world with my grandfather’s film camera in hand made the world come alive. “Wow, has this always been here?” I seem to ask myself.
Yet it’s not the world that has changed. It’s that I started to pay attention.
The world wasn’t magically more alive, interesting, funny or beautiful last Saturday. But seeing it through a camera lens made me realize that all of this has always been there: Curious juxtapositions, beautiful architecture, fascinating geometry.
I won’t know for some time if my photos turned out well, but the beauty is in the process itself, in enriching my understanding of the world.
At least for me, that’s what creating is all about.
I’ve always envied that architects can “read” something as essential as buildings. And musicians who hear references, variations and layers of composition where I only hear songs. And people who understand fashion or public infrastructure or the nuances of furniture.
It’s so enriching to learn new things. It’s like the world is speaking to us in a thousand languages at once, but we only understand few.
This is what happened when I left the house with the camera: I tuned into the frequency and started listening.
I love food and cooking for the same reason. Knowing the history of a dish or the meaning of an ingredient adds so much texture to what we do 3 times a day. Learning chess turned a meaningless garble of figurines into strands of danger, tension, opportunity, rigidity, the list goes on.
To me, this is the biggest gift of creating and of learning: To enrich the texture of perception.
They say that humans can see with 3 primary colors (Red, yellow and blue) while some butterflies see vision based on 15+ primary colors. I sense that any art, profession or field of study adds a primary color to how I see the world.
It reveals what’s always been there, like donning a camera showed me the visual details I had been ignoring.
Maybe that’s why repetitive work is hard for me, why I could never spend 40 years climbing career ladders in the same company or industry, why I read about the most random topics and get obsessed with new things every year.
It’s because I want to see new primary color, discover currents that suffuse the world I live in.