For almost three months after my father’s death I was staying in his flat. Amongst all the other things left in his room, there was his old manual camera Zenith lying on the table. From my early childhood I do remember how its brown leather case titillated my sense of smell , but primarily this magical feeling of holding camera’s silvery body in my tiny hands and pointing its lens basically at anything, just in order to press a button and hear a click. The words light, aperture and shutter speed, thanks to my Father, were in my vocabulary from the very young age. Through the camera’s aperture, Light touches film, for only a tiny shard of the moment, just enough to transport a visual snippet through the tunnel of lens. That is how, on the developed negatives, our lives come out to strut,still by still. So, depending on the skills of photographer, the quality of our lives can have sharpness and softness, depth of field with a range of tonality, or remain undeveloped, if not hidden in the dark. When the eyesight of a camera’s master is no longer capable, then the light can keep existing in the photographer’s thoughts. I looked at my Father’s old camera, and felt that his musings about photography and art, were now continuing in me. Together with this feeling came a realisation that the fact of loosing my father was not the most threatening thing, it was the possibility of the observer like him loosing his eyesight completely, that would have been so much more confronting.
