The sun has a terrible habit. And do you know what it is?
It leaves.
Every goddamn evening.
It does not matter how beautiful the day was, what you accomplished, how much fun you had, how much you worked, fucked, photographed, traveled, argued with someone, or spent six hours wondering what the hell your place in the universe is supposed to be.
At a certain hour, it pulls down the shutters.
End of shift.
See you tomorrow, assholes.
And perhaps that is exactly why I keep photographing sunsets.
Not because they are original. God forbid. The sunset is probably the most photographed subject in history, along with cats, tits, and plates of pasta in overpriced restaurants.
But because every time, it tells the same story differently.
Everything ends. And for that very reason, it is worth watching.
That evening, I was in the countryside.
Nothing particularly heroic.
No Instagram-white beach on the other side of the world, no neon-lit metropolis, no mysterious woman leaning against a bar with a terrible romantic history and a magnificent pair of legs to serve as a warning.
Only fields.
Trees.
Grass.
Insects.
A few animals that probably understood existence far better than I did without ever reading a philosophy book.
And the sun beginning its slow descent.
I had my camera.
Over the years, it has become a faithful companion through journeys, adventures, emotions, and discoveries.
But before all that, photography had been something else.
A way of looking.
And above all, a way to stop thinking while I looked.
Which, for someone like me, already qualifies as a decent form of therapy.
I have spent a great deal of my life looking for something.
Places.
People.
Passions.
Jobs.
Roads.
Answers.
That famous fucking “purpose” that always seems to be around the corner, except when you turn the corner, there is another corner.
A kind of cosmic navigation system designed by a sadist:
“In one thousand feet, continue not to understand a fucking thing.”
Perfect.
Thank you.
So every now and then, I return to much simpler things.
A field.
An evening.
A camera.
The sun low on the horizon.
And for a few minutes, I do not need to know where I am going.
I only have to be there.
The light begins to turn orange and suddenly everything matters.
The plants that half an hour earlier were simply plants become silhouettes.
The leaves look as though they were drawn in ink.
The edges of the grass catch fire.
The landscape you have seen hundreds of times decides, without warning anyone, to become beautiful.
And it is one of the things that fascinates me most about nature.
It does no marketing.
It announces nothing.
It posts no teasers.
It does not send you a newsletter that says:
TONIGHT AT 7:43 P.M. — UNMISSABLE SUNSET. CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE.
It happens.
Period.
If you are there, good.
If you are looking at your phone, too fucking bad.
And while I photographed that sun, the other details arrived.
A small lizard camouflaged against a rough surface.
Look at it.
It is there.
Perfectly integrated into its surroundings.
It does not wonder what its purpose is.
It did not open LinkedIn this morning.
It does not feel it has fallen behind the other lizards.
It has no personal brand.
It eats something, lies in the sun, avoids being eaten, and goes on with its day.
A thoroughly respectable spiritual career.
We, meanwhile, have managed to turn existence into an eighty-year corporate meeting.
“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
“I don’t know. Alive, preferably.”
Leave me alone.
Then there is a spiderweb.
Perfect.
Geometric.
Incredibly fragile.
A structure seemingly designed by an engineer on acid and built by a creature that probably weighs less than the button on my jeans.
You look at it against the light and it seems almost impossible.
And it has been there for who knows how long.
Built during the night.
No rendering.
No investors.
No PowerPoint presentation titled Web 4.0: “Disrupting the Insect-Capture Industry.”
The spider needed to eat.
It built a web.
The end.
And while I photograph it, I think that perhaps we have complicated everything beyond any reasonable necessity.
We work to buy things that are supposed to make us happy.
Then we work even more because those things cost money.
Then we are too tired to enjoy them.
So we book a vacation to recover from the work we do to pay for the life we feel the need to escape on vacation.
Brilliant!
The dominant species on the planet, ladies and gentlemen.
Applause.
Meanwhile, the sun keeps descending.
And that is the beauty of it.
It does not wait for our conclusions.
Nature cordially does not give a fuck about existential crises.
The fig tree catches that incredible light.
The leaves fill with gold.
The clouds change color.
One minute they are gray.
Then pink.
Then red.
Then purple.
Then nothing.
And there you understand a fairly simple thing we keep forgetting:
beauty is under no obligation to last.
In fact.
Perhaps certain things are beautiful precisely because they do not last.
Days.
Journeys.
Nights.
Photographs.
People.
Certain loves.
Certain periods of life that seemed ordinary while you were living them and that, ten years later, you would give anything to step back into for five minutes.
It is an exquisitely elegant con.
Life hands you something without telling you what it is worth.
You discover the price only once you no longer have it.
A person.
A home.
An age.
An animal.
A friend.
A possibility.
A version of yourself.
While it is before you, you think it will last.
Then one day it is gone.
And suddenly it becomes precious.
We are sentimental idiots with a serious timing problem.
Perhaps that is another reason I photograph.
Not because I truly believe I can stop time.
That would be a ridiculous claim.
Time always wins.
It is the greatest son of a bitch in history and has never lost a match.
Taking a photograph means only managing to steal something from it while it is not looking.
One one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth of a second.
One five-hundredth.
One thousandth.
Petty thefts.
The sunset will end anyway.
The person will leave anyway.
The cat will grow.
The car will age.
The place will change.
You will change, my unknown friend.
But that fraction of a second remains.
And there it is.
Proof.
It happened.
I was there.
I saw it.
It does not seem like much.
Then a few years pass and suddenly it means everything.
I have photographed many things in my life.
Distant places.
Streets.
People.
Nights.
Engines.
Faces.
Moments surrounded by noise and others with none at all.
And yet I continue to have a weakness for these apparently useless photographs.
A leaf.
A spiderweb.
A lizard.
A sunset in the countryside.
They tell no grand adventure.
They prove nothing.
They do not have to impress anyone.
They are simply small visual notes left along the edges of my existence.
And perhaps that is precisely why they are honest.
There was no client.
No brief.
No one waiting for those photographs.
It was only me looking at something and thinking:
I like this.
Which, if you think about it, should be reason enough to do many more things in life.
At some point, the light drops lower.
The shapes begin to disappear.
The spiderweb stops shining.
The lizard probably returns to its lizard business.
The field becomes shadow.
The day is ending.
And it is always then that the strange feeling arrives.
Not sadness.
Something different.
A kind of quiet melancholy.
Like walking someone to the door after a beautiful evening when you both know it would be foolish to invent one more reason to stay.
It was beautiful.
Now it is enough.
See you.
Maybe tomorrow.
Maybe never.
It is what we do with practically everything.
We enter.
We live.
We grow attached.
We make a mess.
We fall in love.
We get things wrong.
We change course.
We begin again.
And all the while, we desperately continue searching for an explanation.
Maybe there is none.
Maybe life is not a riddle we are supposed to solve before the end credits.
Maybe there is no final sentence capable of putting everything right.
Perhaps we are here only to pass through it well.
To look closely enough.
Love someone when we can.
Create something.
Travel.
Make a few memorable mistakes.
Lend a hand every now and then.
Laugh a great deal.
And, if possible, avoid becoming complete assholes along the way—which, in all honesty, I definitely need to work on.
That already seems like an ambitious program.
In the end, the sun disappears.
Of course.
That is what it does.
But first it leaves behind a few minutes of absurd light.
Almost a signature.
As though, after setting the sky on fire for half an hour, it turned one last time and said:
Well?
Did you look this time, at least?
Yes.
This time I did.
I had the camera too.
Because I still do not know exactly where the fuck I am going.
But at least, every now and then, I remember to look at the scenery on the way there.
