i’ve started to read the national geographic again a few months ago. it’s funny, the NG probably was one of the most serious motivation for me to become a photographer and i hadn’t read it since i’d left my parents house. yet, my photography has nothing to do with the NG photographs, my work could barely be further from what fascinates me the most. not that i find it strange.
while making a report in los angeles, i met this production manager working on the set with us, we only had one little chat. he said he enjoyed working with french crews, because there always was coffee and cigarettes on the set. i must have replied that it was nice that smoking and drinking coffee was still enjoyed in some parts of the US and he laughed. he looked at me and said he had the feeling i’d travelled and seen a lot more than anyone in the french crew. i was the youngest there. i was surprised and i still am. i’ve travelled a bit yes, but not nearly as much i want to. not nearly as long. barely as far as i’d like to. and maybe he was wrong.
so i definitely don’t find it strange that my work couldn’t possibly be more different from what amazes me. and makes me dream still, yes.
my mother had been raised with the National Geographic, my grand-father had a huge collection and one of my uncles must have inherited it. she took a subscription when i was in my early teens, the french edition didn’t exist yet and she thought it would be a nice way to practice our english, so every month we’d struggle to understand the feature stories and reports. maybe that’s why i got so fascinated by the images.
i’m always surprised how it all rounds up and makes sense somehow, not Sense, just some sense. somehow. like a trail i look back at sometimes. and i watch from a distance where it turned and how. and sometimes i also see why. i see no wrong turns. there is no right or wrong, just choices made too young.
you see beautiful images on glossy paper and you watch a picture appear magically in a solution of hydroquinone C6H4(OH)2 and the next minute it seems, you find yourself trying to tell the world that you’re a photographer.
i still watch eagerly the beautiful photographs in my NGs, i buy whichever edition i find first, sometimes the english one, sometimes the french one, sometimes both. yet, as i read eagerly too now, i often have a pinch on my heart. not because of the photographs, just as i wonder why i haven’t become a scientist. i was fifteen and i wanted to be a photographer, it’s as simple as that. otherwise, had i put more thoughts into it, i would definitely have considered studying sea biology or oceanography, or archeology or volcanos or tigers or sailing boat design and aerodynamics. but at that time, i think that i imagined that being a photographer, i’d have the opportunity to see a bit of it all. like volcanos AND mountains AND underwater life.
i don’t even live near the ocean now.
things follow one another and things change, you go from point A to point H and one day, you remember there was a road to point i, too. had i become a scientist, maybe i would have wondered about my life as a photographer.
i probably still would have had a pinch on my heart when opening the national geographic, though, when watching the pictures on glossy paper.
