This Famous Photograph Inspired Me to Make Photographs

The photograph that inspired me to keep on photographing

On a YouTube channel called The Crit House lesser and more well known photographers are asked to share five images that inspired their pursuit in the genre. Some of the guests I have passing knowledge of, many I do not. Same with the photographs they single out as inspiration.

I appreciate the series because it’s not about gear. Which lately seems the only algorithm result dumped in my feed to choose to view.

It’s about photos. It’s about feelings. It’s about vision.

The tried and true greats like Cartier-Bresson and Mary Ellen Mark and Elliott Erwitt are oft mentioned, as well as more contemporary photographers like Todd Hido and Alex Webb.

What I’ve learned from this series is that there are as many photographers that inspire and that are inspired than perhaps grains of sand at a beach. This is good and how it should be. In the sped up reality of technology, photography has become accessible to just about everyone.

Maybe 90% of these people will never take it very seriously. Content to play. Content to make selfies and call it a day. But there will be, like me, a smaller percentage that are truly moved by the medium.

A small percentage that will see how a picture can shape a feeling or lead to an understanding.

A small percentage that use the act of taking photos as therapy. Or view images to find peace.

I imagined I could put together a similar list and share images that have led me down this path of self discovery. I’m sure at some point I will share that list with you; though of course it evolves as do I.

But the act of art is never about what moves us externally. It’s more the authentic what moves us inside.

Art is the ultimate hubris; because we create not for any audience but to please ourselves. I’m sure Rick Rubin or an endless list of other— including yourself— have thought this. You nod your head now not for my originality but agreement that the Four Agreements were written before I knew anything about picking up a pen to write (that dates me a bit).

So the idea of what photographs inspired me to photograph, well, I think I will pick one of my own.

This extremely famous photograph was taken in 2011. In Laos. On the banks of the Mekong River in Luang Prabang.

The day before I had trudged up the mountain of Mount Phousi and let free a two small birds from a hand-held wooden cage; the symbolism was… letting free the spirit of my father who had passed the day before back in the United States.

The cage and the birds

I was numb for a variety of reasons, many covered already in my book, Lost in Language. This trip to the Far East was my way of letting go some demons. Of finding myself. Of pretending I knew what I was doing with $5,000 worth of Sony camera gear.

I was too old to be a young guy doing the wild oats thing, then returning to reality and a respectable life at home. And too young to be an old guy making his last merry-go-round before submitting to a Disney inspired retirement condo.

In between was where I was. Of course, in between is where we all exist, young or old, always on the verge of settling and always on the go to not get there.

On the banks of the Mekong River that bled out several hundred miles away in the South China Sea, I walked with no idea where I was going. You could almost say now this resembles a movie that should have been made staring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, with the directorial hand of Sydney Pollack that cast everything in a limelight of nostalgia and romanticism.

Except the fact I had a bowling ball in my stomach and the only co-star my imagination. It took a while more for the weight to recede and love come back into my life. In Laos I was more louse than lion. I’d be lying if it were another way, but that’s perhaps for a different blog.

One thing you learn in these eastern countries is there are more monks than no monks. I quickly learned they started young, that this was a career of choice because other careers were more lacking, that monks were people too, and in this case as rambunctious as any kids in more familiar surroundings, like play yards at elementary school.

I’m not taking away the spirituality aspect. I simply didn’t understand. The environment I walked through as a matter of course included the woven reality of boys and men clothed in saffron robes.

With an untrained photographers eye I saw all this in startling 3D. Everywhere and at every angle there was a photography to be taken. I peaked through cracked open doors and windowless windows. I snapped and snapped. I know back then I tried to take holy pictures because, well, I was taking photos of monks.

I failed, of course. Because I know nothing about their spirituality. I was a tourist snapping, not smelling the incense and thus the gravitas.

This picture I share with you is famous. Well, famous for me. Because years later I stopped thinking it was a ruined image. Because of the damn dog scratching itself. Didn’t the hound know it was surrounded by God’s disciples?

It took me years to know the truth and to appreciate this for what it was. Real. An alternate real that made it special. That made me think in arrears.

Think I knew how to take a photograph if I just let myself see.