This explains everything

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This is in response to a comment I got a while ago on Facebook after I had posted a series of photographs I had taken at a neighbourhood fair. The person expressed disapproval of my showing what he called "the unflattering side of the city" and he talked about the fact that I seem to always prefer photographing the broken, the old, the destitute, the decrepit… the ugly people and that in doing so I am doing a disservice to my town. Sure, I often make pictures of pretty, young people too, but there is truth in his claim.

This is something that has been on my mind a lot lately, because I did notice myself my photography is different from that of a lot of my peers'. I recently photographed a festival that happens every year, where thousands of people attend and looking back at the images I took, the large majority of them are so unlike all the other festival photography that I see from my contemporaries. Theirs is beautiful and pretty, almost idyllic. Mine is harsh and raw and often a little jarring. Also true and perhaps even clearer still, it’s in regards to my street photography and the subjects I choose, most all other street photography I see around me is of pretty girls, handsome men, in nice clothes and good, colourful, cinematic light, while mine is monochromatic and coarse and I do tend to be attracted to the outcasts, the marginalised, the junkies and the drunkards, the crooked and the damaged, the old and the limp. The kind of subjects that would never earn me a gig as an official festival photographer because no promoter in his right mind would think to market his festival with my kind of photography. The kind of photography that doesn't really win competitions because I think it reminds us of things we'd rather not think about.

It's a good while since I had noticed this tendency of mine and I started thinking about it. It wasn't immediately clear why I choose the subjects I do, why I make the pictures I do. And while rarely voiced by my audience, I swear I can often almost hear it spoken under breath : "why do you photograph the way you do? Why do you photograph the people you do?" And fair enough, it's a good question, one that I had often also asked myself. And while I did always feel like it wasn't so much a choice, but rather an instinctive reaction to life and reality, I was never really able to understand it intellectually and much less so put it into words.

Until one day when I was listening to an interview of Bruce Gilden, a photographer whose work, by the way, I don't particularly enjoy, and his approach and demeanour even less so. However he did say one thing which resonated with me so profoundly, so loudly, like cathedral bells ringing in my head, something that elucidated everything with one short, simple sentence.

“I photograph myself”.

I shoot who I do, the way that I do, because that's me. I photograph myself.

I was once a broken down husk of a person, beaten and abused, filled with doubt and self loathing. It started when I was a child being constantly beaten and terrorised by my father. I won't go into detail about this part of my life, for many reasons, but I'll just briefly mention a long, dark, leather belt that often left purple stripes on my ass and my back, marks that lasted for days. And I was only probably seven, or eight.

I was also junkie. For twenty years I was an addict. While I did try a lot of different stuff, from over and under the counter medication, to amphetamines, to ketamine, to sniffing glue, to Datura Stramonium, to home-made ether I would sniff out of a rag, none of them gripped me. What did was weed. The damned devil's lettuce! The stuff they sing about in all those songs and praise and joke about in all those movies. The wacky tobaccy that's on t-shirts and hats everywhere, the lowly, innocuous ganja is what made me an addict.

For the longest part of my twenties and thirties I lived in a permanent state of debt. As soon as I would get my paycheck, I would pay off my existing debts to my dealer so I could then buy more weed. When both the weed and the money ran out, and run out it did, sure enough and very quickly so, because my appetit for weed seemed insatiable, I would then buy weed on credit. Because I was never in a job for long enough to make any significant money, the little I did make was quickly spent, so then I needed to borrow more money. I asked my parents, my friends, and shamefully enough, when times were tough, people I hardly even knew. I used to borrow money to pay off older debts. At one time I was sued by the company that managed the apartment building I lived in because I was a year behind on my utility payments. So I then had to borrow money to pay off my entire debt and the legal fees. I often had my power cut by the power company for failing to pay my bills. There were times when I had literally zero money, no bread inside the house, but I did have ten grams of weed. At my lowest, when I didn't have any money left for cigarettes, I sometimes used to go for short walks around my block and ask strangers for cigarettes. When it was either too late, too cold for people to be outside, or when I was simply refused by everyone, I would end up looking for and picking up discarded cigarette butts off the ground. A few of those and I had enough tobacco to roll a joint.

Fast forward a couple of decades since my first joint, jot down a couple of instancesm in the latter years of my addiction, where I had to call the ambulance on myself for some brutal panic attacks, a visit to the ER, one faithful Saturday evening and it's then that I finally stopped smoking. That was five years and a couple of months ago, at the time of writing this.

Getting off of weed took forty full days of night terrors, insomnia, sweats, permanent, generalised anxiety, daily panic attacks, psychosis, very dark, unhealthy thoughts that scared the living daylights out of me -- it was hell. And although I managed to get over it eventually, that has left me with lingering anxiety to this day. Every now and again I still get anxious and that messes with me because I'm a husband and a father now and I have to be strong to protect and provide for my family, but deep down inside, I'm sometimes hurt and I’m sometimes scared.

And while I have managed, in great part, to put my life together, to work the same job for more than four years now, get regular pay raises, get married, have a child, pay off my debts, buy a bigger apartment, put money aside so I can renovate my bathroom in September, you know… things that regular people do, all of that by the grace of God and with His unending mercy, I do still think I'm a bit of a junkie.

I can't seem to stop buying cameras and tech and gadgets. I'm still chasing that dopamine hit of buying new things. Then there's my one remaining vice - beer... I do love beer and while it does seem I have it under control, I sometimes wonder if I'm not drinking too much, or too often... God only knows...

So you see, that's why I photograph the people I do, the way that I do. It's because that's me. I know what it feels like being broken, beaten and afraid. I know what poverty feels like. I know what shame feels like. I know the bitter taste of addiction. I know anxiety and panic. I'm know failure and I know inadequacy.

I understand.

I’m fond of these people and they speak to me and I speak to them, often literally. I often stop and spark up conversations, because I see myself in them. I don't shoot the neat and the tidy, the rich and the beautiful, the strong and the successful, because that's not me, I don't understand that, it's foreign to me. I photograph only what I feel and what I understand.

I photograph myself.