Photography, thinking in silence

Approaching a new discipline for the first time without a technique that limits you gives you a lot of freedom. After writing for just over ten years, I took the risk of taking photographs, perhaps looking for a quicker exercise that would not allow me to think so much, that would only be a summary of what I see and what catches my attention, mainly in the city .

Without looking for a significant aesthetic result, I have found in photography a very practical way of pointing, of getting closer to something. You don't understand the scale of a building until you look at it from below; one does not make something his own until he observes it, draws it or in this case photographs it. And it is that photography is a great tool of appropriation, idealization and fantasy. It becomes an invisible conversation of you with someone else, only you still don't know with whom.

Unlike writing, photography is a silent act; It wasn't until recently when I picked up a camera that I realized how noisy writing is, how chaotic and also tiresome this conversation with oneself is. That is why I called photography thinking in silence. You don't talk to anyone, at least when you're doing it, you dedicate yourself to observing, walking, exploring, going around things, you take your time, there is no such voice in your head that does exist at the time of writing, that tells you what to do, what not to do, that voice that can make writing a heavy and exhausting act. On the other hand, in photography, you are outside of yourself, you detach yourself, you separate yourself and you allow yourself to rest.

There is also a lot of philosophy around a film, from its limited number of shots, which becomes fundamental to choosing what to photograph, to its inability to show you a shot the instant it is taken, which reduces photography to what, for me, is its biggest lesson: surprise, accident and randomness. Not being able to look at something when it is finished generates expectations, generates ambiguity, generates attachment and detachment, generates patience. Many times, a photograph that you have already thought of, from the angle to the object, is not what you expect, it is not good or you simply do not like it, unlike many others from which you do not expect anything, or even before taking you You are undecided whether or not it is worth spending one of those 36 shots to develop. And it is precisely, at the time of development, that all those surprises are going to be presented to you.

Writing is one thing, photography is another. What is sought is different, therefore, the way to find it is also different. One chaotic, the other silent, in the end, both are two ways to find solitude.