Day one

This morning I decided to take my black laptop to the library instead of my silver one. What this means is that I decided – for the first time in years (decades?) to spend a day (a weekday! a sacred Wednesday!) doing something else other than work. Why this morning, suddenly? I don’t know. I was reading an article in TimeOut NY about people who were transforming their lives mid-career. It sent me back briefly to my photo collection, tens of thousands of photographs lying untouched and unsorted in the hard disk of my almost-forgotten black Mac, retired from all serious duties after years of faithful services rendered. I skimmed a few albums aimlessly, mentally classifying, going “hmmm”, stopping for a few seconds to peer closer at some picture. But none of this is new. I have read plenty of articles before, jumped up and down with some new idea, some new thought, inspiration perhaps, for a few minutes or even an hour, and then succumbed once more to the cozy, familiar lull of work. I have too many things to do. I need to edit the manuscript for AOS, finish the response letters to both referees, write the letter to the editor, ship it off, circulate the actuaries manuscript for comments, review George and Isani’s data collection till date, try to code a few annual reports myself to speed up the process, finish updating my lecture notes for the fall, post them up on Blackboard, get it out of the way, get it out of the way, so that – so that, yes, I can do more of the same.

I am amazed at myself. Not at the fact that this morning I walked up and down almost feverishly for an hour – unable to decide between getting work out of the way and making a portfolio that I would need in order to get into the Photo II class at the International Center for Photography, my mind frozen, unable to move, like Harry Potter and Voldemort both in perfect equilibrium in mid-air because their wands are caught in perfect attraction – or repulsion. I finally made the switch – I took out my silver laptop and replaced it with the black one – surreptitiously – I didn’t want S noticing and asking questions that I would inevitably snap at. But I couldn’t do it, couldn’t walk out of the door. S was on a conference call, and I gestured to him. He hit the “mute” button – which he often does – and asked me what’s up. I told him. His face lit up in a goofy smile and he clapped. I wrinkled my face sheepishly. He rubbed my back in a gesture of reassurance. “You worked last weekend, so tell yourself you’ve earned it” he said. I shook my head. “Last weekend was because I didn’t get enough done last week.” I shook my head. Sometimes my logic is too self-defeating, even for me.

As I walk to the library, I experienced the strangest sensations. My stomach did strange twists, as if I were walking to an interview or waiting in a classroom five minutes before the start of a job talk, when the PhD students first start filing in timidly and hang about near the back row. I feel like a fraud, walking in with that file of purposeful students, post-docs and alums who march into the library every day, swiping my card, looking up at the TV screen on the upper right to see if there was a nice quote on there today. No quotes for me today, I haven’t earned them. Athena in Eugene Savage’s mural looked at me with a displeased twist of her lips. Of course she would, she is trying to protect those who sacrifice, stumble and aspire towards knowledge and light from the competing forces of laziness and ignorance.

I went upstairs and found a place in the big room, and felt even worse. All the usual suspects were there, lined up in their usual spots, the guy with the bushy white eyebrows with big stacks of books on the US Senate towering all around him, sitting inside his little fortress of books. My little bald guy of indeterminate ethnicity (Hispanic? Indian?) in the same olive-green T-shirt he’s worn for the last six years, typing away at the Word document that never seems to get done, and the distinguished-looking man in his khakis, loafers and half-sleeved shirt reading books on the Jews in Turkey. All of them, bent over their laptops, focused, industrious, making their lives amount to something. I bolted from my chair and ran downstairs to get a cup of hot water and make myself some Stress Relief Yogi Tea.

Twenty minutes later, I gathered my bearings enough to stop tearing at my nails and staring blankly at the computer screen. I cheated a little bit: I started by googling "how to make a photo portfolio". The first hit was an article out of luminous-landscape.com. Good. That meant it wouldn't be a 5-step wiki entry that read "Select your 25 best pictures. Arrange them in order. Write a narrative. Print them. Your portfolio is ready!".

I tried convincing myself that what I read surprised me, but some corner of my mind was saying, no, not really. Alain Briot wrote, "Most photographers find the idea of making a portfolio pretentious and intimidating." exactly, the very same words I had used to myself. Pretentious, Divya. But hey: I was not going to worry about the consequences. I had permission to be pretentious for one day. For sure, nobody else would care. And today, I wouldn't either.

The next 4 hours went by surprisingly fast. Once I got down to it, the job was just as mentally absorbing as editing a manuscript or running regressions in Stata, because my stomach set up an almost record howl about half-past twelve. More importantly, I acknowledged certain things to myself that I will write down here, for fear that they will vanish unnoticed into the ether, like all the rest of my best intentions. The big reason I haven't sat down and done this before: as long as I'm just skimming through hoards of unsorted pictures, making “mental notes" to do this and that, there is the vague glimmer of a smashing portfolio, the possibility. But once I sit down and come up with the greatest hits, it is what it is. What if I don't really have that many truly great pictures, what if it doesn't really add up to that much? So many hours, hundreds of hours spent taking pictures, nursing some secret hopes of .....something, someday.

Unsurprisingly, that is exactly what happened. As soon as I sat back against my chair, at the end of the burst of concentration, as soon as I stopped doing and instead started thinking about what I just did, the doubts flooded in. Just two albums. Just two really spectacular albums after five years of shooting. The outcome of my grand experiment today. Lucky me, I don't have to think about it.