Resisting Nihilism
JANUARY 2021 ● JOURNAL
I’ve personally struggled with existential and internal dilemmas for the better part of the past year or so. For whatever reason, I’m drawn toward nihilistic assessments of the world around me. In the latter half of the mess of the year that was 2020, I rediscovered my passion for photography, using it as a means to reject my habitual skepticism and replace the negativity with a willingness to accept my inability to answer my own questions about society and the universe. Committing myself to furthering my craft as an analog photographer has helped me cope with these struggles. Through studying the technical aspects of mechanical cameras, in learning the histories of cameras and photographers, and by means of taking action to actually go out and just shoot, I have helped myself to find an inner acceptance of the things I cannot understand - and this will be an ongoing process.
Notwithstanding the possibility of an outcome after death that I’m incapable of conceptualizing, it seems that once our lives are over and we have moved on, that’s it. That’s a morbid idea - no more moments, no more interactions with family and friends, no more joy and no more pain - the absence of consciousness and the cessation of one’s ability to perceive and experience the world. While we are still here though, perceiving and experiencing our own unique passages, death nevertheless materializes even as life exists. It chips away. Things erode, relationships fade, and memories and timelines deteriorate into vague, distant fragments of the past. It’s easy to reflect, looking back on segments or chapters of your life and feel as if those moments occurred in a separate life altogether. As we live, we move forward to death. And it happens every day, every week, month, and year - we just don’t realize it. Death is a phenomenon in that it coexists with life. We see people and places and close doors for the last time without ever knowing it. Every moment, interaction, or happening in our daily lives could be the last of its kind that we ever experience, and we often never realize that particular thing has thus died. That’s reality and that’s life - things get taken from you as you get older. That’s the fact of the existence we were born into. Consciousness is interesting - we are aware enough to perceive it, yet powerless in truly comprehending what it really is. It’s terrifying to imagine your own death. How can you contemplate non-existence when all you’ve ever known and ever will know is existence? If it turns out that the universe was not deliberately created, and therefore no purpose or guidelines or safeguards inherently exist, does anything actually matter? Attempt after attempt in trying to reconcile these abstractions has led me to only one possible conclusion: I don’t know and I never will and it’s impossible to know the answers: it doesn’t ultimately matter. All that does matter is that we’re here now, experiencing and perceiving our lives as they move forward. And in moving forward, we grow and our perceptions evolve and adapt. The past serves as a tool for reshaping and bettering our present selves and our future selves. There’s simply no benefit in dwelling on the inevitable. If we only have one chance to be conscious - to exist - then we ought to drain it for everything it’s worth and accumulate meaningful moments until our lives are full.
Where does photography fit into all of this existential rambling? Each frame captures a moment. Each roll of film encapsulates a chapter or a stage of life. Photographs preserve our experiences and help to separate the death that surrounds us from the life that is in progress. A moment may be forever gone, but a photograph will remain. And with it, the essence of the time in which it was taken will live on. Photographs are preservations of our consciousness - they allow us to reflect, learn, relive, and feel. And every individual who has ever existed has walked their own path - a path no one else has ever walked - and has had their own relationships, their own moments, and their own complex, vivid experiences which may be vastly different from those of our own. It’s impossible to experience every possible walk of life, see every city, meet every person, but it is possible to witness them, to learn from them, and to imagine them - through photographs.
Each shot matters and every frame is interesting.