Editor's Note, 10/3

News alert: the government shut down on Tuesday. This upsets me on many levels, but mostly I can’t get over how my fall break EOS field trip won’t be making it into Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. And underlying that distress is mostly my disappointment that I won’t be able to shoot killer rolls of film photographs. Pics or it didn’t happen, as they say. And it’s all too literal for me right now.

I guess you could take this to be an elaborate metaphor on the government cramping society’s artistic style, but instead of discussing something so intellectual, I’m going to indulge myself. I’ll use my prime real estate in the paper to reflect on my love for photography that has followed and evolved with me throughout my years at Duke.

My first year I was gripped by a fear of forgetting things, and my photographic pursuits were mostly an attempt to document my life. I would take photos of class (I was in the arts Focus, so no, I wasn’t taking pictures in a 300-person lecture hall), of meals, of friends doing 8-minute ab workouts in the hallway of Pegram, of anything and everything. Throughout the past three years, Duke has also taken me abroad to France, Jordan and Morocco, and I’ll admit that the photos really are kind of great. I was extremely motivated to take photos in these places, given my sense of constant discovery and the rich cultures surrounding me. While less psychotic about my photodocumentation these days, I still kick myself in the shins if I miss a great photo opportunity.

There are a variety of reasons behind a growing neglect of my cameras. They’re heavy. I’m no longer required to take photos for class. I feel really uncomfortable being perceived as an Asian tourist who takes pictures of everything. People get annoyed when they have to wait to take a bite of their maple bacon donut at Monuts while I take the perfect food shot. And each time I come home to Duke from abroad, I’m left feeling somewhat underwhelmed and unmotivated to take photos of familiar things. And so on. And I have to say that something about digital photography lost its appeal for me while at Duke. The reasons aren’t entirely clear, but I suppose it has something to do with the lack of compelling subject matter. There's also this occasional stress I feel of digital photography being way too competitive: some people will always just be ahead of me in the game.

I realized that this shift away from digital photography isn’t indicative of my “slacking off” artistically, though it kind of feels like that sometimes. While I've been taking fewer photos overall, I’ve also gravitated toward film photography. What I do love about film is that each photo taken on an analog camera is a process, and when a roll is finished, getting it developed is like opening gifts at Christmastime. Basically, I can have Christmas on demand. And of course there is just a certain je ne sais quoi about film’s color and grain. There’s a good chance I’ll someday return to digital photography, but only when it feels right again.

I feel the need to say that I am not a great photographer. If I take a great photo, I’m humbled because, honestly, I got lucky and my life was just beautiful in that moment. Why I’m drawn to photography at all, aside from the obvious things like its beauty and ability to capture the unexpected, is that it has the power to arrest my full attention. Curating photos for Latent Image, editing photos, flipping through "National Geographic"—these are all things I could do to no end. (Okay, sure, anyone can scroll through Pinterest and Instagram for six hours straight and be fully engaged, but hopefully there’s a difference between that and the way I interact with photos.)

I’ve painted all these thoughts in large brushstrokes to demonstrate how jumbled my mind is when evaluating how I’ve grown at Duke. Things (the future, the meaning of life, why my government doesn’t work) are very unclear for me right now as a senior. This month's special issue of "National Geographic" celebrates 125 years of photography, and after looking through some of the photos—aside from feeling pretty inadequate as a photographer—I feel this intense determination to one day live a life worth photographing. Photography continues to inspire me to live well and be well, and to simply go about the art of living. Ultimately I try not to fetishize photography, especially in a day and age where everyone is hyperaware of how their life looks in pictures. It’s tempting for me to fall into a pics or it didn’t happen mentality, but I’ve come to terms with a new philosophy: life first, photography second.