The Power of Journey
Behind every picture, there is a story. This is how I unlocked a higher dimension in photography.
I used to be a pragmatic photographer. My engineer mind always drove me to the more practical side of the art of photography. Oftentimes, I prioritized imperceptible technical details over the image’s meaning. My style granted my portfolio a beautiful look, but there was no story-tell.
Recently, one year into an exchange program filled with meaningful travels in Spain, I finally perceived the Power of the Journey.
El Camino de Santiago
El Camino de Santiago is one of the world’s most famous pilgrimage routes, with almost 300,000 pilgrims completing the course every year. Those walking “The Way of St. James” seek spiritual self-awareness, religious consciousness, or selfless completion of the journey. Nowadays, there are dozens of routes leading to Santiago de Compostela, where the St. James remains are kept. However, the most popular route is an 800km track that starts in Saint Jean Pied-de-Port, southern France.
In a practical sense, the pilgrimage consists of several day-long walks, from one city to the next carrying a heavy backpack on the shoulders, with the goal of arriving in Santiago De Compostela. Yet, it wasn’t until I reached the final destination that I figured out what the pilgrims’ goal really is.
I was constantly seduced by the idea of giving up. Defeating each small negative thought filled my heart with a sense of victory. Every time I managed to ignore my painful and sore back, I knew I was getting stronger instead of feeling weaker. By the time I reached Santiago de Compostela, I felt fulfilled by all the small victories collected along the way.
Upon arrival, it struck me that for every small blister on my feet there was a significant learning for my life. Riding in a car won’t give you blisters.
The goal is the journey!
Incorporating this learning to photography
If you are mentally prepared to walk el Camino, it will most certainly change your paradigms. In my case, I was able to merge all my technical skills with creative and artistic ones in the form of storytelling photography.
As months went by, I’ve noticed what I was seeking with my images. Gazing at my portfolio, I finally understood my photographer identity. I found myself with a “revered gaze”, or what Jason Silva perfectly described as:
“A moment of absolute aesthetic immersion.”
I was finally able to describe my art!
My mission with photography is to embrace the viewer with an image so powerful that you forget everything else for a brief moment, jumping into the adventure and narrative behind that photograph.
The way I found to make this possible was telling the viewer what’s behind the scenes and creating a synesthetic experience with sound. This method illustrates the journey behind a photograph.
I believe sound and images are equally powerful to embrace the viewer, this is why I often try to hear a specific kind of music when post-processing my images. I look for something that brings me back to the moment of shooting, so after finishing with editing, I can write about what was like to take that picture.
My new photographer identity
Concentrate for a moment and take a look at the photograph above.
Imagine yourself tired after hiking a 2,300m tall mountain in rough terrain, your soles are covered in blisters and your legs feel weak and itchy since the trail was in a closed forest. You had only four hours of sleep inside a tent and woke up one hour before sunrise to reach the summit, as the camp wasn’t on the top. After an hour of hiking/climbing the cold and wet rock, you reach the summit just as the sun stars to shed its most colorful lights on the clouds above and below you. Your heart pounding in your chest and your fast breath are the only disturbance in the otherwise so quiet environment. As you sit down, a feeling of accomplishment fills you to the point of forgetting you are a photographer and wants to pass on this feeling to everyone else.
Now take a minute to look at the picture, absorbing every detail of it while listening to the song below. (Jump to minute 1:05!)
Depending on how inspired you were, you might have extracted different emotions from that picture. However, I’m sure that the song and the story opened a higher dimension to that flat collection of pixels you just saw. By giving you the complete context and some music to illustrate how I felt at that moment, I’ve managed to totally change the experience of absorbing photography.
By investing in storytelling, I also end up thinking more before pressing the shutter, which brings an essentialist view towards photography. A particularly important aspect especially with today’s mobile phone cameras, but this is a topic for another talk.
So I might have learned the art of photography in an unusual way, and now I’m faced with a challenge: Telling the stories behind all my portfolio images and bringing them to life.
Martin Lima is an analyst at IndicatorCapital, holds a B.S. from Polytechnic School of USP, and has been a talented photographer for half of his life. He is also a rower, drone aficionado and quantum physics enthusiast. He often writes about his photography adventures travelling more than 25 countries.
