Finding Substitute

by shz

darkroom3.JPGI want to write about photography. But what shall I write about it?

I’ve became so distant with it lately that my heart feels almost empty. It was simpler when photography became a way of life. Almost like a religion, everyday I woke up in the morning looking forward for my next print, or my next roll of film. And I found this ridiculous eagerness to show to people and hear about what they think about it.

I used to have more time, and a luxury of abandoning architecture and not caring about it a bit. That sheer bliss of capturing an image and reveal the truth, I felt like an artist. I felt like a truth-seeker, artists are. In living close to the heart of creation I felt I’ve lifted the veil between the world and its source. When friends were drawing lines on paper chasing the success tower, I exposed light to one and felt grand. I had no competition nor I intended to have any, future looked like one arrow-straight road. I knew where I was going, I almost had it.

I used to stand in the dark for 9 hours everyday making my prints. I got out smelling all chemical and sweat, but oh boy, was I satisfied. Everyday when I had a good print, when I discovered I got a good shot, when I laid them good on my bedroom floor like lovers, it just felt so right. I slept smiling and had good dreams. Although I was sinking in elsewhere and everything else, I didn’t give a shit.

Suddenly architecture was finished and I did the cliché. When everybody sending out CVs, I thought that was the only right thing to do. When everybody else’s CVs looked like the best industrial design product ever produced, mine was just plain wordings on pieces of white papers. When everybody else spent a fortune printing out and posting in, I only converted mine to PDF and did all the internet mailings. But true, subhanAllah, I nailed my second interview. It was too effortless I couldn’t believe it was that sudden. Almost as if Allah said, try architecture, and I obeyed it.

After all I wanted to be like my father. After all I wanted to be one of the five professionals, alongside lawyers, doctors, accountants and engineers. After all I will get paid and feel like one of the glittering assholes who buy everything their mouths can say. After all it will make everybody happy. After all, oh the after all – I owe it to the six bloody years of painful studies.

But there is no substitute to that period of working part time in the department store and spent everything I made for good photography. Maybe one day, after I marry my architect fiancé and hope he will be rich enough to convert a room into my dark space, where I will remain quietly, and satisfy my heart again.