back (in business)

it certainly feels good to be back in business. it seems like there are so much that can be done, so much that needs doing and so little time for all of it. it's quite a long shot, but i need to give it a go.

on the trip, i've learnt that i do not enjoy taking photographs. i find that the photographs often turn out to be less meaningful than memories, and in the process of actively trying to snap a visual memory, i tend to lose more of the real ones. and to take landscapes, you need the right time of the day, the right light, the right scene (normally without tourists)... it is just too much of a hassle. and if somehow you got yourself, say a lovely picture of taj mahal, so what? its just a beautiful picture... might as well buy a postcard in the first place.

here's an funny excerpt from susan sontag. i must say it's quite a lovely coincidence; i've been wanting to get this book and i found it on my last day in india - on a shelf of a second hand bookstore. here's what she wrote.

"A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photography, and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethnic - Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun."

bloody funny and i can't stop laughing when i read this. maybe it's just the way we travel that makes no sense to engage in meaningful photography; we rarely have time to develop a proper understanding that is necessary for all good pictures. next time, i think i'll cover less ground. i'll choose somewhere that has something that interests me a great deal, go and take pictures.