Ever since I was seven years old, C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle has been the silent mantra in the back of my mind cheering on my creativity:
“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!”
Until about two year ago, I thought my creativity was limited to words. My art classes throughout my educational years were quite clear as to where my talents did not lie. A short list would be pottery, painting, drawing, musical instruments, and singing. But when I was writing, the doors unlatched on my fledgling talents and what I could never actualize on a canvas appeared in ink or through a blinking cursor. I was noticed, encouraged, strengthened. But it never felt like enough, just writing, even though I didn’t fully understand those deep emotions at the time.
In 2011, I studied abroad for three months in Italy with a simple point-and-shoot digital camera. My mind’s eye painted grand images of Saint Mark’s Cathedral or Alpine peaks covered in snow that my camera didn’t quite convey. My lighting was mostly all wrong, I didn’t grasp angles, and everything felt too contained. I didn’t know it then, but I was hooked.
Returning to Italy the next year for an internship, I discovered the wonder of the iPhone camera. Looking back, the iPhone 4S’ camera is quite laughable, but my eye developed in such a rapid way that I’ll always be thankful. It was still something I did for the memories. For the Instagram post making a few of my friends jealous. Nothing rung in my mind that this was where my creativity was also pushing me to explore, even when a very talented photographer that I graduated college with asked what camera I was using and complemented my photos.
At least she was gracious enough to not knock my atrocious editing choices.
It was after Italy that I finished writing my first book, putting the first draft on paper by February 2014. To be kind to the process and myself, it was an angry, hot mess. I’d begun struggling with what would become a five year bout of depression while in Italy, and I took all of that bitterness, confusion, and hurt and threw it onto the page.
It took my two years to write the second draft—a much more gracious draft, an exploration of friendship, a growth in my craft. You think I would’ve noticed the parallels with my development as a photographer, but I’m not always one to pick up on the immediate cues.
While struggling through my first draft of my second novel, my friend lent me The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It’s a ten week course on discovering creativity, nurturing the creative well, and developing yourself as an artist. Every day, the homework revealed to me that maybe my obsession with photographers and Travelgram models all over Instagram maybe wasn’t just wishing to be anywhere but here, to be more in shape than I currently was. That maybe my creativity expressed itself equally in word and photography.
Writing is a way of being seen and seeing the world. Wanting to be in front of a camera is a way to be seen. Taking the photo is a way of seeing the world, so that others can see it too. Suddenly, everything clicked into place. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I finished the first draft of my second novel shortly after finishing those creativity exercises.
Upon receiving a promotion at my job over a year later, just this past June, I finally committed to pursuing photography as much as I pursued writing. I was still using an iPhone camera as my shooter of choice—first an iPhone 6 that got me through an amazing three week escape to Spain and Italy and then an iPhone 8+ I use today—but I could tell my understanding of composition slowly began to expand. And I moved away from cruddy Instagram filters to Lightroom presets. Baby steps are the only way to eventually take the big leaps, right?
I began to research beginner DSLRs for a trip to Iceland, just taken this past September of 2018. My Dad, a long repressed creative, revealed to me he’d had one in his closet, unused except for two trips to national parks with his brothers years before. Instead of having to take on a new cost I couldn’t quite afford due to some surprised medical bills, he graciously gifted me the first DSLR I’d ever get to shoot with: a Canon EOS Rebel XTi 400D. I wish I could tell you what any of that means.
The week before I left for Iceland, I’d picked up the camera and was heading towards a park to practice using the camera when my car broke down on the side of the road. I was stranded for three hours, waiting for the mechanic service to come assist me. Instead of frustration, I grabbed the camera and began to fiddle with it—to see if it came alive in my hands like a pen or keyboard do.
I took some truly boring, awful photos. But there’s also only so much you can do on the side of a country highway where the trees block all of the landscape.
However, a week later in Iceland, the photos began to make sense. The camera began to make sense. Sure, I took a hilarious sequence of about eighty photos where I somehow turned them all an ambient shade of blue, but I could see my creative spark coming alive again. I joked with my friends that I wanted to get better at portraits—they graciously obliged to be my models. I captured them in a flurry of photos, many outtakes becoming the prized photo while the ones where I thought I’d nailed it got thrown into the recycle bin.
I learned that you took four pictures when you needed one. I learned that some presets let you down. I learned that all those years looking at the screen of an iPhone had led me further up and further into my creativity. But, if I’m being honest, I was scared of not having photos from the trip so I was taking back-ups on my trusted iPhone as I went.
When I think of where I could’ve been with a camera had I realized what it does to my creative well, I feel a tinge of regret and loss. I’ve seen some amazing places and people around the world. There are a myriad of stories, many of them my own, I could’ve presented in much more intriguing ways. But, the beauty of creativity, is that it doesn’t leave you behind. It waits for you to bloom, so it can bloom.
When I think of the importance of teachers, other writers, the books I’ve read, and the classes I’ve taken for my writing, I know that I must consider the same sort of intensive steps to grow myself as a photography. I can look at photos on Instagram or Flickr all day long, and definitely learn some aspects of composition or form, but I don’t have the hands-on expert telling me all the little secrets and niggles they’ve learned. When I think of discovering a new place—and Morocco would be a very new place for me—it reminds me of discovering a new art. The hesitancy, the expectation, the beauty, the surprise.
“Come further up, come further in!” I feel the call of photography say to me. So I’m stepping forward, a drastic amateur hoping to learn from a trusted professional. Someone who has traversed the paths of wanderlust and arrived on the other side with a passion, career, and art. What else could I even aspire to?
(This was originally an application essay to win a photography learning class.)
Garrett M Lemons || 