I am sitting under a tree.
It has sheltered me beneath its huge canopy. I cannot see the structure of the leaves, cannot see whether there are flowers there or not. It is just a large dark roof above me.
In front of me is the Svislach. The embankment, concrete, rare passersby. Night, silence, darkness. I am a little bored.
During the day, it feels as if we have many options. Any photographer will understand me. And not even necessarily a professional photographer, but a person who goes out with a camera, or a person who goes out without a camera but simply knows how to look. During the day, you dive into this abundance. You see so much. The world itself offers you frames, shapes, light, faces, trees, reflections.
But sometimes you do not want to choose from what is already given. Sometimes you want to look into the unknown. To trust what is here now. To see what is around me within arm’s reach. To touch it, in another language.
I take out the camera. Maybe out of boredom. Maybe with a childlike curiosity. I point it upward, turn on the flash, and take one shot.
Not ten. Not a series. I do not check the screen.
Just one shot.
I see the flash light up the tree for a second. And the world immediately returns back into darkness. I put the camera away and continue walking through the night city.
But later, already at home, when I open this photograph on the computer and develop it, I suddenly see what I did not see there, on the bench. Leaves. Flowers. Structure. The beauty that, at that moment, was right beside me, above me, around me.
I made a simple accidental “shot” with the camera, but it illuminated what was already there in reality.
In the note “A View from the Dark”, there was the thought that sometimes you need to remove the excess light in order to see differently. To look from the dark. To listen from silence. To step out of the noise of the day, out of the obvious, out of ready-made illumination.
Here the thought is similar, but it is about something slightly different.
Here I am not simply looking from the dark. I am trusting the space. Trusting the moment. Taking a step without knowing what exactly I will see.
Perhaps this is how it happens in life too.
We make some simple step. Sometimes almost accidental. We direct our attention toward a place where there seems to be nothing special. We illuminate a piece of reality for a second. And in that very moment, it may tell us nothing. We see only the flash, a brief illumination, an instant. And then everything returns to darkness again.
But something has already happened.
We have already exposed reality.
And now we only need to stop and see what has emerged.
