My Anxiety Hates Street Photography.

There is one of my photos framed on my wall. Printed big, and it is the only photo I took that I have framed and kept it for myself. An old lady dancing at Piccadilly Circus in London, caught mid-movement, completely in her own world, surrounded by a city that wasn't paying attention. I took it on one of the first trips my wife and I took together after we got married. I had no idea then how it would come out or what that photo would come to mean to me. 

That is the thing about moments. You don't plan it. You just have to be there when it happens. And being there, truly and fully there, has always been the hardest thing for me. This post is illustrated by photos from around that same time of my life. The beginning of my long term relationship with street photography.

If you know me, you know that I may look pretty chill and quiet but also that have a tendency to stress about things more than I should. My anxiety lives in two places at the same time. The future and the past. My head is always planning for tomorrow, running scenarios for things that haven't happened, calculating outcomes I can't control. But it also pulls backward. I hold on to things that have already happened. Conversations I replayed too many times. Decisions I made and can't unmake. Things done to me that I never quite put down. Maybe the past is what keeps me trying to prepare for the future and the present moment, the only place anything is actually happening, is the hardest place for me to stay.

Early in my career as a creative it got bad. I needed to prove myself constantly to clients and to the people above me. I had a boss at the time who was very competitive and had a way of making everyone around him feel like their ideas weren't good enough. Only his were. So, I worried, not about one specific thing but of the slow weight of not being enough. Not talented enough, not fast enough, not resilient enough to survive in an industry that rewards the kind of confidence I wasn't sure I had and relived that in my head over and over.

It got dark enough that I needed help. That kind of admission takes a while to make even to yourself.

Photography came into my life around that time. At first it was just something I did while traveling. A way to register places I had never been. My wife and I would go somewhere new and I would walk around with a camera, pointing it at things that caught my eye. No clients. No briefs. No one to impress. Just me and whatever was in front of me.

I didn't fully understand what was happening to me when I shot. I just knew I felt better. Calmer. More like myself.

. . .

"Realise deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the now the primary focus of your life."

-Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

. . .

That is exactly what street photography forces you to do. You cannot be somewhere else when you are trying to catch a moment. The moment is gone before you finish the thought. The light shifts. The person moves. The street does not wait for you to stop thinking about yesterday or worrying about tomorrow. It just keeps happening and if you want to be part of it you have to show up completely.

For someone whose brain is always somewhere else, that is a relief I don’t know if I can't fully put into words, but let me try…

When I am out shooting, I am free from the thoughts that follow me everywhere else. The regrets I carry, the fears I project into a future that hasn't arrived, the conversations I have replayed more times than I should. None of that survives the discipline of watching the streets. Because watching a scene properly and finding interesting moments takes presence. The light at the end of the block. The two strangers who almost collide and don't. The old woman who starts dancing at Piccadilly Circus for no reason anyone can see.

And slowly, without planning it, that presence started teaching me things. What catches my attention, what draws me in, what I keep returning to and what kept my mind a bit more quiet. A certain quality of light. People lost in their own world. Moments of stillness inside movement. What you photograph is a map of what you notice. And what you notice tells you something about who you are.

The creative freedom surprised me. For the first time in a long time I was making something for no one but myself. No approval needed. No fear of not being good enough, because good enough for whom? The photograph either moves you or it doesn't. The only judgment that matters is your own.

That process of discovery, of learning to read your own eye, is entirely about being in the now.

Almost twenty years later I still reach for a camera when the noise gets loud and return to the street, to the light, to the only moment that actually exists.

The old lady on my wall is still dancing. She has no idea I exist, or that her moment of unselfconscious joy ended up framed in a stranger's home in Florida. She was just there, fully and completely there, in a way I am still learning how to be but my camera is a great teacher.

Still learning. That is what Street Hours is for