Broadway Markets

Whenever I look at this picture, my eyes immediately go to the man in the white t-shirt with the long hair. I don’t know why— nothing about him is particularly interesting— but to me, he seems to be the center of attention. And I love that. I’ve always found it funny how photographs, when left unexplained, have a way of making someone into something they might not be. Maybe he’s a rock star, maybe he’s the next Ernest Hemingway or maybe he’s just a guy who likes outdoor marketplaces and wearing white t-shirts. There’s no way to know for sure unless I track him down and ask but a little mystery is good for the soul.

There’s something about people that is so wonderfully fascinating. We believe ourselves to be more intelligent, more civilized and more exquisite than our animal counterparts but are dominated by instinct and impulse all the same. I think the main difference is that we’ve just given them fancy names (See also: conscience, pg. 64 and following your gut, pg. 130) Our existence is driven by the need to survive; by the need to feel safe and secure. We are more primal than we care to admit.

It’s a curious case — our denial of our primality— and is certainly curious enough to invoke the 5W’s. What are we without impulse? Who are we with it? Why do we fight against our instincts and where does that get us? When did we decide that they were to be the next great extinction? We were born with impulse and instinct running through our veins for a reason; if we didn’t need them, evolution surely would have caused an eradication mutation by now. And, call me crazy but sometimes ‘just because’ can be a pretty good reason for doing something.

I think about fear a lot, about how much it weighs. And, I wonder why we are so willing to carry such a heavy burden around all of the time. Of all the emotions our ancestors passed along in our genetic code, it’s strange to think that fear made the list. But, it seems as though it’s a necessity— if not for the fear instinct, we wouldn’t know the difference between danger and safety. It has kept us alive for centuries and continues to do so but then again, how many times has it prevented us from doing something amazing? It seems as though the lines between danger and safety have become increasingly blurred.

So what is it, exactly, that divides either side of the chasm? And how is it that we decide which side we would prefer to be standing on? If fear is the psychological response to what we perceive as a threat, why are our impulses so often at the receiving end? For surely, they can’t all be dangerous or life threatening and the ones that are, are usually so nonsensical that they aren’t worth the adrenaline rush anyways. We love the game of risk but hate the idea of impulse being the driver behind the wheel. Since when did being impulsive become a negative characteristic? If the whole world was content with playing it safe, we’d probably still be living in caves.

I am a time waster and I am quite good at it, too. I put things off, I procrastinate, I am indecisive and noncommittal because I fight the impulses that encourage me to jump in and trust that the water is fine. But can you imagine what I could do with all of the time I’ve wasted being afraid? I could’ve learned another language or finished three more majors or even have told someone the truth before it was too late. But regrets are just fears in disguise and I will not fall prey to their strangling hands.

I think I always look to the man in the white shirt because he looks like a person who long ago decided that arguing with himself was not worth the echoed answers. Skip a haircut? Why not. Jump on a bus going in the wrong direction? It’s not the worst thing you can do. Traipse across a foreign city with just a film camera and a paper map? We fight too many losing battles in our lifetimes for our impulses to be one of them. Ask the questions you’ve always wanted answered; say ‘I love you’ to someone who might not say it back; allow people to change you without being afraid of falling apart. You can fight or you can fly but you can’t do both— not at the same time. And, remember that you don’t need a reason for everything. Sometimes ‘just because’ is good enough.

The Bottle-cap Mosaic

This mosaic was framed on the outside of a restaurant in Shoreditch. From far away it looks like a myriad of different tiles but up close, it’s actually entirely composed of different bottle-caps. I took this as a second thought, as an “Oh, that’s kind of cool and I need to use up my last five exposures,” sort of ordeal. The evidence of its informality is the small corner of a finger across the lens in the top right corner.

In retrospect, I think part of it reminded me of home; of a jar on a bookshelf filled to the brim with fortune cookie slips and Coca-Cola caps. It was exciting to find a piece of myself etched into a wall in the middle of a foreign city. Less metaphorically, I just thought it was pretty. But looking at it now, particularly in light of the recent tragedies across the world, I see something entirely different.

I am of the opinion that pain is not beautiful. It is not poetry or novels or Top 40 Hits because those come after the pain. Those come after the funerals and the mourning and the all-consuming grief. Those come after the acceptance. Sometimes I wonder whether we use the words acceptance and concession synonymously.

But they are not interchangeable. To accept something is to tolerate it while to concede something is to give it up. The difference between them lies in the balance of power and who has it; acceptance assumes that you are in control whereas concession ultimately decides that you are not. When faced with insurmountable pain, we often feel out of control, reminded once again of our size in comparison to the universe. We make concessions with ourselves and with other people, giving up our wants, our needs and sometimes our lives all with the hope of finding stable ground– all with the hope of regaining control. The ability to inflict pain tips the power scale; the ability to incite the fear of pain tips it even more.

Anyone who has researched the Salem Witch Trials understands that paranoia and fear were the driving force behind the convictions. Anyone who has ever studied the Cold War understands that fear and paranoia were the driving force behind McCarthyism the Red Scares. The possibility of pain was enough to cause friends and neighbors to turn on each other. The fear of pain was enough to cause friends and neighbors to concede their logic in the pursuit of safety. And, in the end, the thing they had feared the most became the thing they had been causing. Pain is power; the fear of pain is control.

The definition of terrorism is “the use of violence and intimidation in pursuit of political aims.” I think a more accurate definition is “the use of fear and pain to force others into giving up control.” Terrorists can not terrorize without that shift in power; they cannot induce fear without having that control. But, if we refuse to be afraid they cannot win. If we see their world full of hate and raise them one full of love, they stand no chance. While I understand that these statements are easier said than done, when faced with horrific episodes of mass hatred as those seen in Paris, Beirut, Baghdad and now, Mali, it is important to remember to face those incidents without fear of the people who caused them. We must retain our control.

The word mosaic, when used in its verb form, is “to combine distinct or disparate elements to form a picture or pattern.” I’d argue that this picture and this work of art do just that. The bottle-cap sculpture aims to create an image out of a million distinct and disparate elements and comes together in the mosaic of a human being. It is the most accurate portrait I think I’ve ever seen.

In the aftermath of great tragedy, we must remember that while pain may not be beautiful, the most intricate pieces of glass can only arise from the flames that melded its separate parts together. And, when we look at the world and the people in it, we must also remember that humanity wouldn’t be a beautiful stained glass mosaic without all of its distinct and disparate elements. We cannot live without each other. But, if we allow hatred and fear to consume our hearts, we will not be able to live with each other either.

Hampstead Heath

I took this picture during a group outing to Hampstead Heath, one of the many green spaces scattered around and outside of London. We had taken a bus from our hotel in the Bloomsbury District and had gotten off at the end of the line. From there, we were given about half an hour to grab lunch before heading to the scenic hills for a picnic. I had decided on some fruit and a sandwich.

The walk was hilly but became entirely worth it as the landscape unfolded at our feet. There were people everywhere– sprawled out on the grass, running along the paths, reading books, playing fetch with four-legged companions or simply bathing in the sunshine and seventy degree weather. It was the kind of place that encouraged leisure, invited expression and incited appreciation. I couldn’t help myself from wishing we had visited sooner.

The park overlooked the city and on a clear day, like the one pictured, you could see for miles. It was kind of surreal, looking out over the world that I had spent the past twenty days losing myself in. And it’s funny, really, how skyscrapers look like monsters up close but like nothing more than cottages from miles away. I wonder if it’s possible to ever truly know something without having known it from all perspectives. Maybe that’s why people are so difficult to understand.

 I’d never considered green to be a part of the whites, grays and blacks of city color palettes and yet, it fit so perfectly. I couldn’t get over how vividly alive everything was or how easily industrialization had built itself around the roots and branches of ecological function. How was it possible for the destructor and the destroyed to live so harmoniously? Then again, I guess that kind of depends on who’s doing the destroying.

London is famous for its rain and its clock tower but I think its parks are more representative. They stand out against the tall buildings and crowded streets, an ode to how London must have looked before someone remodeled it like a Lego house. The philosophical part of me thinks of the parks as living history; that the trees are ringed with thousand-year-old stories we’ll never hear, taking root in earth that has existed for 4.543 billion years. That the parks are the culmination of every person who has ever visited them and of every person who has ever decided they were worth saving. Because after all, in a city nicknamed “The Big Smoke,” something has to be a breath of fresh air.

Old Spitalfield Market

I spent three weeks of my summer running around London with a twenty-seven exposure camera as my weapon of choice. Where my classmates had unlimited storage on their phones and memory cards, I only had twenty-seven chances to get it right. And, while having twenty-seven chances is infinitely better than having just one, it sure as hell made me think a lot about which moments I wanted to keep.

The picture above is a still from an outing at a covered marketplace in the Shoreditch district of London. I took it on the twentieth of my twenty-one days in the UK; on a day spent traipsing across a city I wasn’t ready to leave behind. The Old Spitalfield Market was one of the last stops on an adventure that had taken us from the rocky beaches of Brighton to the top of the London Eye. And this is the one of the last pictures I took.

Looking at it now, I can see why the marketplace earned a spot on my film reel. There’s something about the lighting that fascinates me. The air was full of naked bulbs, hanging like suspended raindrops above our heads. There was something intricate about the bare metal framework, about grayness illuminated by yellow light. It felt like looking at the skeleton of a city skyline, like looking at skyscrapers before they had become more than just scaffolding and ghost lights.

I don’t know who the man in the picture is but I am intrigued by him all the same. I wonder whether he was a tourist (like me) or whether he was a vendor. And if the answer is the latter, if the aesthetic enchantment of the marketplace had worn off after countless hours under its makeshift starry night. I can’t imagine that it would but, then again, I’m obsessed with lighting, with boney buildings and with the way that people look under both. And maybe that’s why I took this picture in the first place. Because I wanted to capture the magic before time and familiarity could convince me that it hadn’t existed.

I love this picture because I had loved this place. There is something hauntingly beautiful about seeing memories take shape on 4×6 pieces of photo paper. And there is something undeniably exciting about rediscovering the moments you had forgotten about. Maybe that’s why I love film cameras; because you never know what you’re going to get. You know that they’ll be full of pictures, full of surprises and full of the people that used them and, you know that collectively, those twenty-seven exposures tell a story. Maybe it’s the rediscovery that keeps me clicking away or maybe it’s my compulsive need to share the stories that fascinate me. Either way, if a picture is worth a thousand words, twenty seven can fill a chapter.