∴The Art of Growing∴

A lesson learned the hard way

This week I saw someone on a popular platform¹ receive a salvo of criticism for uploading some photos of daily life in Russia. The images were not political, but the responses sure were. It made me think of the time I spent there traveling from Vladivostok to Moscow, and how I almost lost every picture from that trip.

When I was 26 I spent a month in Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Russia had always been a mystery to me. I just couldn’t imagine quite what filled it. A full month to travel and photograph there was a dream that took a few years to realize, carving the finances for it out of my teacher’s salary.

The trip took me through 9 cities and across lake Baikal to Olkhon Island. I could feel the country becoming more European the further west I went. The architecture became more ornate, the food more delicate. The longest train rides were in the east and center of the country, and in the space of one particularly long segment I went from shorts to a hoodie and blanket and back to shorts without ever leaving the carriage².

The trip ended in Moscow, and after flying back to South Africa for a quick visit home, I returned to Seoul and transferred all the images from my cards to my computer. A few days later it died.

I hadn’t backed anything up. My cards had been wiped. The thought that every one of my images from Russia might be gone just filled me with dread. They had felt like the first big step forward in my photography, the evidence that I’d begun to grow. I rushed the computer to a repair shop, a dead weight in my bag much like the one on my chest.

I had to wait a couple of days to hear back about the computer’s repair and whether the images were still there. I felt pretty bleak during this time, and that was compounded by having had the repair conversation in my fledgling Korean, constantly second guessing whether I’d properly explained I needed the hard drive intact.

I got the call to pick up my computer in the impersonal prose of a compu-text. I crash-landed at the repair shop and opened the computer right there on the counter. There they were, each image safe in its folder, and with them the sense that I still had the proof I’d grown as a photographer. I spent that night backing everything up, but the frustration with myself for having been careless took a while to fade.

I learned on the back of all of this that I needed to build a system around my photography that would protect my efforts. It was the initial intimation for me that it was more than just taking the photo that deserved my care and time. I realized that growing as a photographer meant a lot of hard work needed to go into the things I wouldn’t be showing, into building the infrastructure around keeping the work safe and available. More recently, this thinking has developed into figuring out how to share the images in a way that might be worthwhile for the people who see them.

Photography comes with a lot of growing pains, but, along with skateboarding, it’s the only thing that’s ever seemed worth the trouble. With every new year and every new tweak to the system, all the effort leads to what it’s supposed to: growth.

Cheers,

Chris

1. It was Reddit, the foil to my claim that I try to produce more than I consume.

2. Even skirting Siberia is no joke.