Voices of Photography

A speaker/photographer at this year's Wedding & Portrait Photographers International (WPPI), which just ended in Las Vegas, said the following on stage.

"The most important thing about photography is yourself."

I've been struggling with this statement for days now. When I first read it, it didn't seem to jolt me. I realized there was much sense to it. There is a calling and a vocation for photographers, and much of it is in training yourself to see the world through a filter. There is much to exercising extreme discipline and skill while balancing the nuance of having to communicate with your subjects. In many ways, it is very much about bringing yourself to a new level of comprehending the environment of light, figure, and ground around you. Yes, it is very much about yourself. Granted, the context was at a self-improvement seminar-based conference meant to equip photographers with a greater skillset. It is unfair for me to remove contextuality and isolate a quote which can seem very objectivistic. So I partially concede on that notion.

I buried my laissez-faire interpretation of the speaker for a day. Then I began to look at my photographs from the past year. I began to see that most of these photographs told a story. These stories were never about myself. They were always about something else happening apart from my own understanding. Several of these images spoke back to me. They affirmed softly, "Albert, there is a story unfolding within these borders, and it is much bigger than you." I have a watermark that I place on commercially licensed images to preserve the rights usage of their original intent and protection for future use. These images though, would never receive such a mark. It would be an act of hubris, great disrespect, and complete ignorance.

Flashback May 2009. I was sitting in my room in Mumbai, India. I just came back from my first afternoon of visiting the largest slum community in the world - Dharavi. The temperature outside was close to 120 degrees. I flipped through my first images, and the image of a toddler walking barefoot in the alleys caught my eye. I wept for her. I never thought I would cry from a photo I took. It was that day that I realized photography was never going to be about myself.

The following images were taken at St. John's Medical College in Bangalore, India in 2009, one of the country's leading medical institutions renowned for their educational staff both nationally and internationally. So much, that Downstate University of Brooklyn, NY, sends teams of students in 6-week rotations to learn about diseases and conditions not commonly widespread in first-world countries - ie. typhoid, hepatitis C, dengue fever, tuberculosis, etc. Every face and hand has a story I will never know. There are voices to be heard.

How about my voice? Not as important.