18/09/2023
The Beach Life
"📷 Capturing Moments 🎥 | 7+ Yrs Exp" "📷 Capturing Life's Moments, One Frame at a Time 🎥
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Our Story
I can’t remember exactly when I stopped carrying a notebook. Sometime in the past year, I gave up writing hurried descriptions of people on the subway, copying the names of artists from museum walls and the titles of books in stores, and scribbling down bits of phrases overheard at restaurants and cafés. It’s not that my memory improved but, instead, that I started archiving these events and ideas with my phone, as photographs. Now, if I want to research the painter whose portraits I admired at the museum, I don’t have to read through page after page of my chicken scratch trying to find her name. When I need the title of a novel someone recommended, I just scroll back to the day we were at the bookstore together. Looking through my photo stream, there is a caption about Thomas Jefferson smuggling seeds from Italy, which I want to research; a picture of a tree I want to identify, which I need to send to my father; the nutritional label from a seasoning that I want to re-create; and a man with a jungle of electrical cords in the coffee shop, whose picture I took because I wanted to write something about how our wireless lives are actually full of wires. Photography has changed not only the way that I make notes but also the way that I write. Like an endless series of prompts, the photographs are a record of half-formed ideas to which I hope to return. Last year, I wrote something about a leech salesman whom I’d met in Istanbul. Weeks later, a friend who had been with me in Turkey wrote to say how impressed she was by the particulars that I had been able to recount. “Did you make detailed notes that day, or do you simply remember all this?” she asked. In fact, I had written the essay after studying photographs that I had taken of the man and his leeches. When she praised a specific bit of description, I had to admit that it hadn’t come about spontaneously—it was only after looking carefully at the photographs and trying out various metaphors that I settled on the idea that the leeches were gathered around the middle of the bottle like a belt. Even when I’m writing longhand, it’s rare that I do not have my photo gallery open, or have a few photographs in front of me. If I am trying to describe a place, I find pictures that I took of that place; if I am sketching a human subject, I look for images of her. When my own albums fail me, I go down the rabbit hole of Google image search.
Photographer - Abir Roy
