Two Photographs

I was going to write some­thing along the lines of this:

I have stopped taking pho­to­graphs. Right now I don’t know where to point the camera, or when to press down on the shutter release.

But the words felt a little wrong: I am still taking some pho­to­graphs, on occasion, and to say I have stopped wouldn’t be entirely true. Yet I do feel that I am strug­gling to see things I want to pho­to­graph, strug­gling to put things into frames; and further to that, I am having trouble getting my head around the question of why I should even be spending time thinking about frames or looking for things at which to point a camera. What is my aim, my purpose?

Here are two pho­to­graphs, one that was taken a couple of weeks ago, and one that I took about an hour before writing this post:

A photograph taken on the road between Zhuhai and Doumen sometime during the June of 2009.

A photograph taken in my apartment in Lianyungang on the 30th of June, 2009.

I don’t know what they say, or what I want them to say. I feel as though I’ve taken them before, and I most probably have. Aside from their sig­ni­fic­ance as doc­u­ments, or depic­tions, of my personal experiences, neither of them is espe­cially unique, or espe­cially meaningful.

My voice doesn’t seem to be speaking through them.

Within me, though, are ideas, thoughts, feelings that I want to express. I may not be entirely certain of their shape or com­pos­i­tion, but those things are def­in­itely there: I can sense them pushing out, exerting pressure. And I want them to be expressed.