We all do it. We all photograph ghosts.
I have found myself often photographing the residue of something that has passed. By the time I have set up my camera: the moment has gone. And what I am actually doing is trying to capture something that no longer exists: the special quality of light that made me want to capture it in the first place has now gone, but somehow, I am clinging onto an impression of what it was, and not really seeing what now ‘is’.
There is a disconnect.
What we ‘see’ in our mind’s-eye, can cause problems for us. Because by becoming emotionally attached to a moment of great light and composition, we can fool ourselves into thinking it is still there 10 or 20 minutes later, when in fact it has long since passed.
There are two kinds of photographic ghost:
the ‘love is blind’ variant. This is the ghost we conjure up out of idealism. We manage to ignore the faults and distractions in the scene and only focus on the parts we like. This is a condition that all of us face, where we lack objectivity in what we see.
The ‘moment has passed’ variant.
Both of these variants, at source, have the same issue: we see what we want to see, and not what is actually there.
So how does one avoid photographing ghosts? Indeed, can one avoid it?
I have given this some thought and I think it is impossible. Firstly, human beings are terrible at recognising that the only constant in life, is change. We latch on to moments in our existence and tend to think they last for much longer than they actually do. Unless we are trained in Buddhism, or some such philosophical aspect that allows us to recognise that nothing is permanent, then we all suffer from the illusion of thinking that what we experience has more currency than it actually has.
I find it intriguing that I am often photographing something that is no longer there. I am always living in the past because there is latency in my central nervous system. My senses do not work in real-time: light enters my eyes, is converted into electrical pulses and fed down my optic nerves to my brain where there are further delays in processing what I just saw. Everything I see has already happened. Everything I feel to be happening around me is a memory.
So perhaps, we should accept that we‘cannot avoid photographing ghosts. Everything we witness has passed. Perhaps the best remedy is to learn to ‘let go’ of capturing what one saw, but recognise that at best, we may come home with a residual imprint of what we saw.
For me, I deliberately leave my films for some time. In a way, I’m trying to forget what I saw, and what my aims were. This allows me to ‘let go’, and to simply work with what I did capture, rather than working with the ghost of what I thought I photographed.
