Looking into photos of street photography seems to have an interesting effect on my writing.

I wouldn’t call it inspiration. It rather puts me into the right state of mind.

On paper what writing and photography share is that they both try to capture the reality in order to communicate it to others. They do it via framing — capturing a finite slice of infinite. But this is impossible.

It is impossible to capture the reality half-way, 1% or . We are talking about infinity.

To me this has always been demoralizing. Every time I try to frame something, it keeps escaping. Then I try again and again. It’s always shit. All you get is shit. It’s just disappointment. Like trying to take a picture of mountains — “as soon as you put a border on it, it’s gone”¹.

For this reason I like to meditate on great of street photography. It shows me what I am doing wrong. As a novice I try to cram as much of the reality as I can. Masters don’t do that. Instead they paint a different reality in which time is frozen. There is no time dimension in their world. Great photographers don’t try to master capturing reality, instead they create a new universe of which they are the masters.

1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. ↩︎