The world of phenomena never fails to amaze.
I stumbled my way up Snowdon last year with a camera in my pack. I didn’t take a single picture on the way up because I was too busy with the exertion of the climb. When I got to the top there was a thick mist obscuring the view in all directions. It was very busy, my hands were freezing because I had no gloves and I got well-chilled eating my sandwiches. There is a small plateau which counts, I think, as the mountain’s official top but there were so many people trying to get up to it that I decided not to bother. I went just a little further and suddenly the line of jostling forms and sloping stone resolved itself into this:
I have a small series now of photos of figures in fog and mist. They could be seen as a metaphor, of course, but that would be a big mistake. To my eye, they are studies in form. I raise the camera, look through the viewfinder and wait for the scene to resolve itself into some sort of visual coherence. Then I press the shutter button. Simple as that - except that it took me a whole lifetime to get to where I was standing for the 1/60th of a second that each shot took.
We may imagine that we are born into a life waiting for us like a stage set on which we play out our role but I think a better way of looking at it is that the life we are born into is ours alone and is unique. Your life is whatever you encounter and so one else is living the same life as you. You can’t exchange any part of your experience for anyone else’s but a photograph is at least one way of revealing it.