I ask myself this during the night, before falling asleep: why this? There are things we love without knowing why, that we keep doing when nobody is watching and when it does not pay, and almost always they are the ones that resemble us most.
A word that comes from far away
Passion comes from the Latin pati, to suffer. The ancients knew that a passion is not chosen, it happens to you, like love. I have photographed since I was fourteen and I do not remember the day I decided to. I remember that at some point it was already inside me, and that taking it away would have meant taking away a piece of me.
Take away work, roles and habits, and what you keep looking for is your passion.
What it costs
Whoever has none mistakes it for a whim, and whoever has one knows how much it asks. It asks for time, and time cannot be invented, it is taken from something else. It asks for nights, doubts, wrong shots that seemed right, days when it seems not worth it. And then it gives everything back, in one thing nobody can measure from outside: it gives you back yourself.
So when someone says it is a waste of time, I know they are speaking of what they can see, and from outside very little is visible. What happens inside, while you live it, is the part that is most yours.
Two ways of being passionate
Psychologists who study this subject distinguish two kinds of passion. The harmonious one, which enters your life and makes it fuller, and the obsessive one, which takes command and leads you where it wants. The difference is not in how much time you give it. It is in who decides.
One way to tell is to look at how you come back from your passion. If you come back more present, kinder, more open to others, it is doing you good. If you come back closed, tense, in debt to someone, perhaps it is using you. For me photography always leads back toward people, and that is enough for me to trust it.
The music you cannot hear
I have always thought that photography and music are the same vibration at different speeds. Photography is music slowed down until it becomes visible, and every face is a note nobody has ever played. Passion, for me, is the way you tune yourself to that vibration. This is why, while I photograph, time disappears: I am not counting minutes, I am listening.
Giovanni Gastel, one of my references, said he had always been more drawn to what he glimpsed than to what he saw directly. I believe passion trains exactly this, to feel what barely arrives, and to recognise it when others have not yet lifted their gaze.
If you have not found it yet
Do not look for it anxiously. Look at what makes you forget the hour, what takes hold of you for no reason, what you would do even without witnesses. If you cannot breathe without it, that is the one. It has probably been waiting for you since before you started looking.
For me it was photography. It brought me back to myself, and every time I return there is someone to meet, and it is me.
