Compassion

From the UK, I have brought back with me George Eliot, the famous English female writer of the 19th century. I picked her because she stayed in Kenilworth which is near Coventry, the base city of my UK tour. Her first full-length novel, Adam Bede, portrays the countryside of Kenilworth in her time.

She wrote in her Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings:

"Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the people. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have ideas about evanescent fashions -- about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily-laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of the true one."

My inspiration from her monologue is: If street photography is mostly about shooting people, one objective befitting it can be photographing the general public in the street through a compassionate eye.

The single important thing about photography in the higher level is, to me, a theme to thread through the photos which in turn gives a unique taste or style to the works. The above has all along been the underlying theme of my photos, which I have been trying hard to perfect its manifestation in the final images.

Think of a theme. Just do it before you shoot.

Oh, it's great to be back home.