After a recent conversation with a co-worker, he helped me understand one of the main principles that drives me to do what I do.
Wonderment. noun. A cause or occasion of wonder, Astonishment, Surprise, Curiosity about something.
I realized that the feeling I get when I experience wonderment is what keeps me interested and pushing forward. Much of what I do is in search this feeling. Tasting new food, watching movies, looking at art, music etc. I search for this feeling in everything I do. I believe this is what keeps me connected to something and makes me search out answers to quench my curiosity. There is a lot of research out there concerning wonderment, some of it makes comparison to seeing the world with a child like awe. When you grow older you naturally lose your sense of wonder as you learn to understand how things work and start to ignore regular things in life as we concern ourselves with “more important” tasks.
There have been many sayings that we take from literature that warn us from ignoring the small things and all that makes up our regular day to day lives. Some of these quotes can be deep and some are simple. They all try to some up that wonder, being one of our human emotions, can be easily experienced just by changing the way we see things or simply paying attention to the mundane. What we thought was just part of our environment can add beauty and connection to our lives. Street photography does this for me in many ways. It makes me slow down and look at what is going on, I look at how people interact with whats around them and how the light moves between the buildings. I see an interaction and create an image of that moment, removing what I don’t want in the scene to simplify and create interest. The story is always one filled with questions, who is this person? Where are they going? what are they doing?
The one thing that I take away from each session that I photograph, is that few people seem aware of what is going on around them, The amazing light, how the buildings look at a certain time of day. I always wonder what they are looking forward too? Are they just avoiding the people directly in front of them? Are they just trying to get somewhere? I recently made a shot of people crossing an intersection. The light was reflected from the windows of a building, It made the scene seem staged almost. I purposely shot with a slow enough shutter speed so that it blurred the identity of the people as they were not the main subject matter of the images. They just became props in the image as it was all about the surrounding scene and the light. Almost as if it were a city landscape and the people were blades of moving grass. These are the types of images that create that sense of wonderment for me, did the architect of the buildings know that the light would do this? Is it just a happy accident?
I feel that acknowledging this is important when you want to see things in a different way, Don’t accept the conformity that leads you away from seeing the world in a different way. This sense of wonder can lead to a whole different way of understanding, generating a whole new level of curiosity. Stay young and see things in a whole new light. I allow myself to be amazed by things and that feeling keeps me searching for the next thing that will amaze me.