Eyes WidE oPEn

Do you recall people asking you that ONE question:
                      
                       "if you could have, WHAT would you have been?"

This is how I usually react:
My brain goes....
                          b l a n k.
                                       I have NO idea?! I'm happy with my life!


But.
Then that question keeps crawling back into my head, it keeps nagging me, at work, at home, in the street, in bed, in the subway when I'm crushed against huge smelly people (although, then usually my answer is something on the line of LET ME BE A MASSIVE BOTTLE OF DEODORANT PLEAAAAAAASE!)


so yeah, what's that thing i really wish i could have been?
I'm not talking about a fantasy or some kiddy wish like next Nobel prize or Guillaume Canet's wife.
No i'm talking real profound stuff here.

the kind that when you think it, it's like absolute blinding evidence.


And recently, it has dawned upon me. I've found the one thing that turns me on.


P
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                          H
                               Y


to capture the perfect magic of the instant. 
                   To be able in one shot to put together on a square of paper a whole atmosphere, to seize that one thing you can only feel but put no words on.
the glitter, the sadness or the roughness of an eye, the colours and their blankness and their warmth, the beauty of the imbalance of a composition, the electricity and the peacefulness of the instant. Some scrumbled footsteps in the sand, not neat no but bearing witness of a story. 


OFTEN, I find myself face to face with a moment SO INTENSE for its' energy, beauty or atmosphere that I try to both open my eyses WIDE OPEN to take it all in, and at the same time close them to safeguard that magical picture I have before me.


Of course I just end up blinking like a twat.


OFTEN I loose myself looking at a beautiful picture, a small detail that nobody else cares to notice, a failed shot that stills hits me for the unaverted movement it managed to capture.


I can do this for hours.






OFTEN I am seized by the sheer strength of a photograph and all it reveals. 
About the subject, but also about the eye of the photographer. 
                                                                                                      And I love this.
There is in photography, more than in drawing or sculpting a magic: the strange and absolute mixture of reality with your own subjectivity.
                                                                          Because this is the world, but YOU framed it.






Yes, If I could have, I would have been a photographer.