Through a Different Lens
Whenever I look at one of my photographs, some version of the scene plays out again in my mind’s eye. It isn’t long, usually just a few seconds—a brief cinematic recollection filled with sound and movement, a return to moments buried deep within my memory. Their vividness often unsettles me, as do the thoughts they evoke. Even though these instants may be frozen visually many remain for me emotionally unresolved, still demanding my attention years after I first witnessed them.
I have learned that I cannot escape these images, no matter how rarely or how often I might look at them. Filled with fears and fondness, they represent the collected memories of hundreds of journeys, decades of work. When considered together, they force me to confront not only their own ambiguities but also the conundrum faced by any photographer attempting to piece together the kaleidoscope of a past, one image at a time.
When I set out on this photographic life, I was eager to see to anything and everything. I wanted to roam the world, capturing its joys and its follies, indifferent as to whether I portrayed hope or sorrow, embracing both with equal curiosity. Yet, over time, a darkness began to encroach. The moments of violence hardened me without my realizing, returning me a stranger to those that I loved. I could still marvel at the infinite whiteness of the Arctic or the golden warmth of an Italian afternoon, but in my dreams, again and again, I would find myself being pulled to an edge beyond which there was nothing. I would fall and fall before waking in my bed or sleeping bag, soaked in sweat and startled to be alive.
It takes a far finer balance than I ever imagined to live with the past, just as it does to stand, physically and emotionally, in a scene, knowing what to watch and when to move. These images, circulating like old slides on a Kodak carousel, have become ingrained in my consciousness; the more powerful the image, the deeper its hold. I am caught between the duty to remember and the desire to erase.
My photographs not only remind me of where I’ve been but also what it has taken to get home again. For each journey between the familiar and those places where life and death are weighed on another set of scales is a voyage through an emotional no-man’s land, somewhere between war and peace.
James Hill
