More Important than Fear

This morning all of the fear and the doubt I've tried to keep at bay landed on me with full force. 

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear." 

-- James Neil Hollingworth.

This morning, my fear shut down the importance of any competing emotion or rationality. I am meeting with the aforementioned photographer in a little over a week. I want to bring her samples of my work. That I have. What I do not have are photographs taken since February. I haven't taken a single real photograph since February. I don't know what's wrong with me. I seem to have just Shut Down. I used to take my camera everywhere. Today I actually had to wipe the dust off my camera bag. It hasn't left the shelf more than twice since I moved here. That alone made me cringe, but was nothing compared to the weight and breathlessness to come.

Yesterday I stumbled upon the following self portrait of Erin Johnson, a local Minneapolis photographer that make my chest cavity clench with intrigue and excitement, and had therefore saved.

The color and the clarity in this shot make my skin prickle. After rediscovering it I spent the hours before work pouring over photography websites and the notebooks I keep ideas in, and resolved to spend my time before work today taking my camera out and photographing Something. Anything. Everything. 

I started out by attempting to take a photograph of myself just to remind myself that I Can Do This. Every click of the shutter revealed an old, tired, and stressed face. There were bags under my eyes and that prominent, unrelenting wrinkle sinking vertically between my eyebrows stared back cold and affronting. The camera felt heavy in my hands. The lenses were wrong, the lighting was off, the color was bland. But I decided to pull my face around to the side of the camera it belongs and go out anyway. 

I got one block away. Every step I took I felt weaker and weaker. The pressure to take just one photograph kept mounting and muting the voice in my head trying to shout: "It's okay! Take your time. Any photograph is a success; will feel better than not having taken even one. It will get better. You will find It again. This isn't paramount." Nothing resonated. Nothing resonated except the tingling in my lips and fingers, the weight of the camera, the increased gravity pushing on my shoulders and feet, the tightness in my throat. I felt nauseous and dizzy and terrified. I suddenly had a deafening urge to throw down my camera and run away from it. My hands actually shook as a put my camera in my bag and ran home, locked myself in my room, and cried.

What if I Don't Have It? What if I lost It? How can I meet with someone who I want to, need to, impress with empty hands and a face much older than my years? Today I feel as though I am in mourning. In mourning for a gift I only ever felt I had a tentative grasp on at the best of times. I don't know if I can do this. I don't know that I am strong enough to fight against gravity. Against doubt. Against The Dread. I can't freeze up like that if I want to do this in a meaningful way. I need to discover a new way to interpret a lexicon that is lost on me. I need to learn the language of light and of color. I need to speak with subtlety and lucidity. Through all I've read and listened to about lighting and aperture and shutter speed, so little of it has permeated though any membrane of understanding, and my best work is born out of luck and timing and the kind of curiosity that moves with blind reaching and missed steps along the stairwell. I need to learn to draw from the well when I need water as well as when the reflection of the ripples on the stone catches my eye. 

Another thing that worries me about my estranged relationship with my camera: Have I lost the ability to capture the inspiring things in my life, or is my life absent of inspiring things to capture? Perhaps a little of both.

And now begins the process of rediscovering that which is more important than fear.

Here are ten things:

: Passion

: Curiosity

: Knowledge

: Excitement

: Shallow depth of field

: Candid Moments

: The smell of developer and fix on my hands

: Victory

: Contrast

: Growth