What Does It Mean to Photograph Your Soul?
Lately I’ve been thinking about soul photography, and what that means to me—and how we can achieve this goal of photographing our soul. I think it’s interesting to consider photographing the internal world, within you, rather than the external world, simply due to the fact that I’ve already photographed the external world. This is my personal journey, and honestly, it seems like it’s actually a lot easier to photograph the external world in my opinion. You arrive at a location, you understand the fundamentals of photography, you adapt your technique and philosophy into these new environments, and you execute the photograph. It’s very plain and simple. Photography is easy.
Photography has everything to do with how you engage with humanity.
When I say this, I mean that photography has nothing to do with photography. The visual game of putting together the foreground, middle ground, background—synthesizing content with form—it’s very intuitive, and I don’t believe it takes that much effort to learn to execute properly. However, my understanding is that photographing your soul, and your genuine and authentic raw perception of the world, is much more difficult to achieve.
Why?
I believe it’s difficult to know yourself. It’s easy to look at the world outside and recognize a beautiful moment, to hunt for something decisive, to recognize the patterns in nature and human behavior, and to press the shutter at that moment—that fraction of a second. It’s intuitive. However, what’s not intuitive is understanding yourself on a deeper and more emotional level. Just sit with yourself, in silence, and really contemplate how you feel about the world, how you feel about yourself, and how you genuinely fit within the grand scheme of life. Your philosophy, your morals, your ethics—it’s very difficult to display these in a photo.
How to Photograph Your Soul
My thought process around how to photograph your soul simply derives through flow state. Entering flow state means existing in the present moment, producing photographs while being detached from the outcome itself. When you snapshot your way through your everyday life and simply follow your subconscious mind and genuine childlike intuition with each photograph you make, you enter this flow state—and I believe, achieve the goal of photographing your soul.
In order to photograph your soul, you have to disconnect from the world around you in a way, and create your own world.
The New Goal Is to Create a New World
Once you’ve already traveled the world and photographed the external world, it seems that the next goal is to then photograph a new world—to create your own version of reality. I find that the photographs I’m making these days, through the spirit of play—not taking myself so seriously—not only provide more joy in my everyday life, but are guiding me through life in a way, where the more I photograph, the more I understand myself and the world around me.
I’m treating photography as a way for me to have a dialogue with the world, and to extract from it—creating my interpretation of reality. To me, art is the closest thing to tapping into the metaphysical, beyond the material plane. And perhaps to photograph the soul is the ultimate striving—vertically—to achieve this goal of transcending the world through photography.
It may sound a bit lofty, and a bit extraordinary, but I believe this is a much more interesting approach to making photographs—going beyond the ordinary, striving towards the extraordinary.
I believe that life isn’t necessarily what it seems. There is so much mystery and so much to learn. And through photographing each day, I enter this childlike spirit of transformation, flux, change—ever learning and growing through the medium.
When I make a photograph, not only am I affirming life by saying yes, but I’m also asking the question why?
And the more I ask the question why, the more I understand myself—and get to the root of what it means to photograph my soul.