DOWNTIMES

A person is rarely beautiful

We usually think of photography as a mean to convey beauty, as a tool to transfer the beauty we see with our own eyes inside a rectangle of some kind. And it is. Photography is about beauty but, as I would argue, it’s first and foremost about memory. Fifty years after a photo has been taken of, let’s say, a young lady, her great-grandkids don’t look at it as to find out if she was pretty. They look at it as to find out, quite directly, if she was, to have proof of her existence, and how she was. They look at it to find out who she was…



A few days ago, a friend of mine showed me a couple of pictures of her mother when her mother was about 28 years old. What was special about these photos wasn’t that they were or were not beautiful; it was that they simply were, that they existed as testimony of the lady’s life at 28 because my friend never quite met her own mother. Her mother passed away, not of sickness but of sadness, when she was 28, when her baby, my friend, was 4 years old. And these photos of her 28-year-old mother are all she has: they are all her mother ever was…

When I got into portrait photography a couple of years ago, I tried doing so in a bare bone home studio where I stressed over the spotless quality of the faces I was capturing while using one sided semi-professional lighting alongside Kobe, my dear camera. I wanted to take beautiful photos, meaning, crispy clean, well-arranged faces inside proper rectangles, regardless of the fact that these rectangles were or were not the truest representations of my models. Afterwards though, I came to learn that most of these photos, although lovely, were not the truest representations of my acquaintances and could not be, for the most part. Why? Because they represented the manufactured, ready-to-shoot-in-a-studio-under-ideal-conditions versions of these people. So the pictures I took were beautiful albeit somewhat lifeless. With a few exceptions, they weren’t particularly memorable…

The fact is, no one, not a single person is always beautiful. We, as human beings, have downtimes, moments when we wake up or go to bed with crumpled, worn out faces, moments when we feel sick, tired, stressed out, lonely, hurt, mad or just old, moments when our postures actually reveal every single one of these emotions. However, rarely do we use photography to capture these moments. And whenever we do, we tend to hide or delete them as quickly as possible because they’re not good-looking. Hence they tend to fade and disappear and what’s left is a collage of our lives’ best of’s: favorite, pretty, social-media-ready moments we love to share but which only tell the most flattering parts of our life stories.

Well, I have learned with my trying of portrait photography that downtimes, times when we feel our most vulnerable, actually make for the more realistic, faithful and timeless pictures, because they showcase us, as we are. Indeed, they rarely make for beautiful photos. But they make for honest photos. They represent who we truly are because they represent who we are most of the time: ourselves. And our selves, our true selves, not necessarily our best beautiful selves, are always memorable, just like my friend’s 28-year-old mother remains to her daughter: memorable.

So here is a snapshot of my personal downtimes. I couldn’t find anyone to shoot (or willing to be shot) in these moments so I did what I never do, what I never enjoy doing: I shot myself. As a photographer, I don’t like shooting myself because I don’t like selfies, which I despise for what they say, specifically, of their compulsive takers. However, this photo transcends a selfie; it is a self-portrait. It is a photographic expression of a carefree moment, taken on a whim, with no artificial lights, no preparation, no dress code, no makeup, no forced smile or seductive posture, no willingness to appear as something other than what is. It’s also who I am more times than not, on my way to 48, and it has been taken for the simple photography of it all, with the little knowledge I have gathered, so far, of portraiture.

Do I like it? Well, does it even matter? I know one thing: I like that it exists because it serves a purpose, a memory. A memory, possibly, for my great-grandkids to be…