At some point in life, you are young enough to believe the future must have a plan.
Then you grow up and discover that the future, in most cases, is only a long series of improvisations performed by people desperately trying to hide from everyone else that they have no fucking idea what they are doing.
These photographs come from before.
Before photography became work, archives, deliveries, selections, post-production, and all those very adult things that manage, with remarkable efficiency, to work their way even into what you love.
Back then, I had just discovered a camera.
I was a boy with plenty of questions and very few answers.
A dangerous combination.
I walked.
I took pictures.
I thought too much.
Then took more pictures, probably to keep myself from thinking even more.
That afternoon, I found a boat.
No billionaire’s yacht, no Caribbean sunset with a half-naked model leaning against the bow, and no French perfume commercial.
A little boat.
Old.
Worn.
Its paint eaten away by time, the wood scarred, a pair of oars thrown inside, and that melancholy air peculiar to objects that have worked hard and no longer need to prove anything to anyone.
It was there on the shore.
Still.
And of course, I photographed it.
Because when you first begin taking pictures, you catch this strange disease: suddenly everything seems to have something to say.
A rusty door.
A puddle.
A crooked tree.
A forgotten boat.
You spend half your previous life ignoring the world, then buy a camera and start behaving as though an old bench contains the secret of the universe.
It is ridiculous.
And wonderful.
That boat really did tell me something, though.
I probably only understood it many years later.
We are not aquatic animals.
We were not made to cross a river.
Throw us in one and, after a sufficiently unheroic amount of time, we will begin to sink, flailing our arms like assholes.
And yet, at some point, someone looked at the water and thought:
I want to go over there.
Then he took some wood, put it together the right way, and invented a means of crossing something for which nature had not equipped him.
When you think about it, that is profoundly human.
The problem is that we use the same ability to invent nuclear weapons, personalized advertising, and eight-in-the-morning corporate meetings, so I would avoid congratulating the species too enthusiastically.
But the idea of the boat remains beautiful.
You cannot walk on water unless your name is Jesus and you lived roughly two thousand years ago.
So you build something that lets you do it anyway.
Maybe life works more or less the same way.
We all arrive at territories for which we are unprepared.
A job we do not know how to do.
A person we do not know how to love.
A loss we do not know how to bear.
A new city.
A fear.
A choice.
The future.
Especially that.
The future is an enormous body of water, and at twenty or thereabouts you stand on the shore wearing the intelligent expression of someone hoping instructions were left for him.
Spoiler: no one left them.
You figure it out.
You build a boat from whatever you can find.
A few dreams.
A little recklessness.
Three fairly confused ideas.
The mistakes your parents made, which you solemnly swear never to repeat before repeating some of them in creatively different ways.
The people you meet.
The people you lose.
And a handful of things you discover almost by accident that, for reasons you cannot explain, make you feel better.
For me, photography had become one of those things.
I did not yet know what it meant.
I was not thinking about portfolios, publications, or a career.
There was no strategy.
God bless those days.
I did not have to build a visual identity, think about an audience, social media, algorithms, or which photograph would be more successful.
I took pictures because I needed to.
Which is probably the best reason to do anything creative.
I had thoughts I did not know how to put in order, and the camera had become a kind of translator.
It solved nothing.
But it gave shape to the chaos.
When something tormented me, I could go out, walk, and look for images.
Looking through a viewfinder narrowed the world.
Everything else disappeared.
A rectangle remained.
Light.
Shadow.
Composition.
A subject.
For a few seconds, life became manageable.
And it felt damned good.
Perhaps creativity serves this purpose too.
Not necessarily to create masterpieces.
That is the romantic part we tell afterward.
Sometimes it simply keeps you from suffocating.
Some people write.
Some play music.
Some paint.
Some take a piece of metal and spend six months turning it into a completely useless but beautiful motorcycle.
I took photographs.
It was my way of putting a boat between myself and the water.
During that period, I often wondered what I would do with my life.
An enormous question adults love asking young people as though they themselves had found an answer.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Hell if I know.
Preferably not an asshole.
That alone would have been a respectable plan.
The rest was confused.
I knew only that the idea of a completely prepackaged life frightened me.
School.
Work.
Mortgage.
Weekends.
August vacation.
Retirement.
Death.
The end.
Perhaps with a bigger television at every stage, so you would not notice that life was getting smaller in the meantime.
It did not seem like enough. It still does not seem like enough today.
I had not yet understood what I wanted.
But I was beginning to understand what I did not want.
And that is something.
I looked at that boat and perhaps, without realizing it, this was exactly what I was photographing.
The possibility of leaving.
Not necessarily for a place.
Leaving a version of yourself.
Leaving a shore.
Entering an element you do not know.
Accepting that something might go wrong.
Because a boat makes sense only when it leaves the land.
On the shore, it is only wood.
In the water, it becomes what it was built to be.
And perhaps the same is true of us.
We can spend an entire life anchored.
Perfectly intact.
Perfectly safe.
Perfectly unused.
No risk.
No storm.
No shipwreck.
But no journey either.
Naturally, this is where some fucking Instagram motivator would say something like “cast off and chase your dreams.”
Easy.
Sometimes you cast off and simply smash into a rock.
Life does not guarantee a happy ending merely because you were brave.
Courage is not insurance.
It is only the price of admission.
You can try and fail.
You can choose badly.
You can leave and discover the destination was awful.
You can fall in love with the wrong person, believe in the wrong project, invest years in the wrong direction.
It happens.
It has happened.
It will happen again.
But at least you moved.
And every time you move, you learn something you could never have understood from the shore.
In the third photograph, the boat is not even there.
There is only a plant illuminated by the sun.
The most ordinary thing imaginable.
The kind of subject many photographers today would probably not even consider, too busy searching for something spectacular enough to earn three seconds of attention online.
I photographed it anyway.
Because back then I was learning to see.
And perhaps that was the most important thing photography ever taught me.
To see.
Not merely to look.
To notice.
The light passing through something insignificant and making it beautiful for thirty seconds.
The shadow.
The textures.
The marks left by time.
All those small things that exist before our eyes while we are too busy worrying about tomorrow to notice them.
Photography forced me into the present.
And it was exactly what I needed.
The future asked me questions.
The camera asked only:
What do you see now?
Much simpler.
Much more honest and intimate.
Years later, photography would become many other things.
Work.
Technique.
Responsibility.
Frustration too.
Because any passion, once it starts paying a few bills, inevitably puts on a little tie and begins to be a pain in the ass.
But looking at these images reminds me of when none of that existed.
There was only a boy.
A camera.
An afternoon full of thoughts.
A boat that was not going anywhere.
And an enormous future ahead that had not yet decided what the fuck to do with me.
Perhaps that boat was me.
Motionless on the shore.
Already a little weathered inside before I was old enough to be.
With a few oars available and no precise idea of the direction.
But ready, somehow, to enter the water.
I did not yet know where I would arrive.
To tell the truth, I am not entirely sure I know even now.
But at least I have learned one thing.
You do not need to know the entire route.
Sometimes all you need is something that floats, enough curiosity to climb aboard, and the bare minimum of recklessness required to leave the shore.
You discover the rest along the way.
And you will probably make one hell of a mess.
But at least it will be yours.