My life splits and evolves, as I suppose all lives must. There is my life pre-long covid, and there is my life with long covid. It's simplistic of course but in many ways it feels true. I used to be outside more than in. For the past two weeks I have not been outside save to go to work. I am too unwell to walk to the shop at the end of my street. The distance that was once nothing has widened into an unbreachable gap. It will pass, at least I hope it will.
I won't pretend to be well adjusted to this life with long covid. I have lived it for more years than I care to admit at this point, but I have only known about it with absolute certainty for a year and a half. In that short amount of time, I have had to mourn my old life, the one in which my body was so very different. It has not been easy. It is not easy. I still cannot really talk of my bicycle and when I do it's with a flippant attitude. 'Oh well, I can't do this now,' I say with a wave of the hand and a fake smile on my face. Those gestures help ignore the ache that lingers, that will never truly leave. I'm learning to live with this ache, to reconcile myself with the possibility of never cycling again. Yes, maybe I will at some point, but hope is dangerous and I do not dare kindle it too much lest it never becomes true. Most of the time, this is okay. Time is a great healer and all that. Cycling is not within my control. I let it go as best I can.
Instead, I am learning to spin, to weave, to crochet, to embroider. This newfound creativity brings me an enormous amount of joy. I can make, unburdened with what things were like before. I never practiced any of those crafts, never even considered I could have an interest in them. Ten years old me would be revolted at the idea of 36 years old me sitting on a sofa with yarn on my lap and a crochet hook in my hands. Ten years old me did not know very much.
I'm writing all of this and I've not come to the subject of this blog post. It's easier to skirt around, to pretend I'll get to it, to let it exist in a state of permanent stasis, at once real and non-existent. So here goes... photography.
Photography haunts me.
Image making has long been a part of my life. I have had periods with less photography than others but always I have come back to it. In 2018, it was via the rediscovery of film photography. I instantly fell in love with the process and it's fair to say became obsessed. I explored and learned many techniques before settling on my tried and trusted Minolta SRT303 with Ilford FP4 at 200 ISO and developed in caffenol. This was my happy place. You'd be hard pressed to find me without the camera slung over my shoulders. I lived and breathed with it. I cycled to work with it. I walked around the neighbourhood with it. I went on long hikes with it. I went food shopping with it. I went to the pub with it. You guess what happened next... long covid slithered in my life and it all became too much: the developing, the scanning (please do not look into my drawer of negatives yet to scan), the light editing... I lost the energy for it.
I had known this before. I had left the world of digital because of an editing fatigue. Too many photos to sort through, too many hours of staring at a screen to edit when all I wanted to do was be outside. This was not the same but there was a solution: cut the developing, cut the scanning, get a digital camera. So I did. And for a while I was in love again with photography. I did not know then that I was living with long covid, that the ripping pain and endless tiredness (I did not know to call it fatigue then) were a sign of something more than my hormones having a moment.
The diagnosis of long covid came and I had other things than photography to think about. Still, it hovered close to me. Cameras are all over the study, film still stuff the top shelf of the fridge. One day... one day... And one day did come but the films are still in the cameras and I have no willingness to finish them, let alone to develop them.
I purchased a waterproof camera to take with me to the lake. It isn't much more than a point and shoot and I idly thought I'd help me return to photography. It didn't. I gave into my phone and used the camera more and more. It cut all barriers. Once the shutter is pressed, I can open the editing software, and have an image I'm happy with in ten minutes at the very most. It's easy. It's not photography. At least it's what my brain persists in telling me. It is not that photography has to be made with a so-called proper camera. It absolutely does not and I'll always be first in line to defend this truth. What my brain is telling me, what I do not want to listen to is this: this is not your photography, not the one you want to make.
Tears come as I type those words.
It's a simple truth. It is in my head often enough. I am careful never to voice it though. This is yet another loss. My photography helped me to bear witness and enter into an act of reciprocity with the world. As I wrote in my bio: 'I step out of my worries, quieten my mind, and let my body experience the world.' I have not been out of the house for two weeks except to go to work. This is not an exceptional circumstance.
Here I am, yearning for a camera in my hands, for the smell of caffenol and negatives hanging from the shower curtain as my partner asks me when the things will be dry so she can have a shower. I am yearning to be out and photograph because this was a pillar of my identity. My life has split, evolved, and for now, for an unknown period of time that may last the rest of my days, I can no longer do this, be this person I used to be. I have attempted to photograph indoors, to play with shadows and abstraction. I have created images of my life with tea, with fibres. I snap images here and there of brief holidays, of short burst of light and shapes during my rare commutes. Photography is still a part of my days only it does not bring me the joy it used to. None of it is at it was and I do not know how to adapt.
With cycling, it's easy enough. I don't cycle. If I do there are consequences that lessen the scope of my life to the sofa, the bed, the sofa bed. So I don't. This means I can have spinning and crochet and weaving and embroidery and writing. With photography, it is not so easy. I have a backlog that keeps growing, tools that beg to be used, but I no longer know how to do this.
Photography haunts me and I have become too adept at living with the ghost of it. I am not sure where to go from here. Do I stop trying and focus on my scanning and editing backlog? Do I simply wait and let the flood of grief consume me again? Do I seek a different way without a camera, let myself finally explore paper and light? Do I continue as I am, image making of all the little things of my life and let it find its place as my photography now? I do not know. The answer probably lies in the midst of all of this. At least, I have now let the cat out of the bag. This too I must mourn. This too I must change.
