A moment you can’t get back

The second you name a moment, it’s already gone. Not the present any more, the past, and there’s no getting it back or repeating it. You can try to recreate it, same spot, same light, same people, but it will never be identical. Time’s already moved on to the next thing. Photography is the strange art of grabbing hold of that moment anyway, knowing full well it can’t be exactly reproduced.

So what do you do with that, as a photographer? Spend your time mourning everything that’s already slipped past, or feel lucky you managed to catch some of it on the way? I go back and forth. Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment is really just this idea dressed up in French. Like comedy, apparently, photography is mostly timing. Do you freeze the action with a fast shutter, or slow down and let some blur and motion into the frame? How fleeting is what you’re actually chasing, and what does a bit of movement add to it?

My own version of this

Over the years I’ve got better at noticing these moments and trying to hold onto them, especially with my kids, especially when they’re playing together and don’t know I’m watching. I want the mess and the spontaneity of it, not a posed version. Any parent will tell you the same thing: they grow up while you’re not looking properly, and then one day you are looking properly, at old photos, thinking where did that go. My son’s 25 now. My daughter’s 15. I still don’t quite believe either number.

Learning to live with mistakes

I’ll be honest, I don’t take to mistakes easily. I like precision, I like planning a shot properly, I don’t enjoy leaving things to chance, so when something goes wrong there’s a proper flash of frustration. A blurred frame, blown highlights, a moment I simply missed. Those are the things I try hardest to avoid, and mostly fail to avoid.

But looking back over what I’ve actually shot, the path to a photo I’m proud of was never a straight line. It’s trial and error the whole way, learning to see a scene not just through the lens but through everything I got wrong trying to shoot it the first time.

It’s usually the misfires that make me rethink what I’m doing, shift the frame, check the focus again. They show me an angle I wouldn’t have tried, or drag out a feeling I wasn’t expecting to capture at all. Each mistake teaches me something, even when I’d rather it hadn’t needed teaching. They’re not really setbacks. More like uncomfortable nudges toward seeing the same photograph with slightly fresher eyes.

The photo I end up keeping is almost never the first frame, or the second, or the third. It’s whatever’s left after a run of adjustments and false starts and moments of thinking this isn’t working. Take those out of the process and I’m not sure the image I actually wanted would ever have turned up.

So yes, I still want control. I’m not pretending otherwise. But I’ve come round to thinking there’s something in the unexpected too, the mistakes, the missed shots, the ones I got completely wrong. That’s as much a part of my photography as anything I planned properly, and it usually gets me closer to whatever it was I was actually trying to say with the picture.

Where that leaves me

Photography, when I strip away the gear talk and the technique, is really just an attempt to hold onto something that’s already leaving. Every photo I take is an admission that the moment won’t come back, and somehow that doesn’t feel morbid to me, it feels closer to the point. You’re documenting not only what you saw but roughly what it felt like to be the one holding the camera.

I still want the shot to be right. I still get annoyed when it isn’t. But I’ve stopped expecting the process to be tidy, because it never has been, not once, not for me. The mess is where most of the good ones come from anyway. If that’s the trade, catching a moment you can’t keep in exchange for never quite controlling how you catch it, I’ll take it. I don’t see another option, really, and thirty-odd years in I’ve stopped wanting one.

Also in this series: Part I — An Introduction  ·  Part II — Why Do We Photograph?  ·  Part III — The Emotions of Photography  ·  Part IV — The Art of Storytelling  ·  Part V — Identity & Self-Expression  ·  Part VI — Connection Through Photography  ·  Part VII — The Philosophy of Impermanence  ·  Conclusion