We always looked forward to summer. We wanted school to end and the holidays to begin. We tried to squeeze everything we had planned into those three months. Summer would pass, and when September arrived, we would feel that familiar dread reserved for children who did not like going back to school. There would invariably be a summary of a book we had been forced to read in our schoolbags. And children like us would feel that we had done an injustice to the author of a book that had taken so much effort to write. Summaries stripped away the details and took the magic out of literature. Beautiful things happened, but they could not be summarized.
Then school would start, and we would never speak of that summary again, as though it were a family secret that must never be revealed. We were never even given grades for the compositions we wrote on sheets of paper bought individually from the corner shop. We never learned what our teachers thought of our writing or how well we had done. One of those summers, we also discovered that there were books containing summaries of dozens of other books. There was no artificial intelligence back then, but clever shortcuts had always been a currency of their own. They called it intelligence. Years later, we learned that children with connections to the system were sometimes given the actual exam questions in advance. Perhaps today it is the children of those who secured positions within the system who are trying to govern us. But somehow, it just doesn't work.
We had been given a formula: "introduction, development, conclusion." Later, we came to understand that good novels never followed such a formula. Most began somewhere in the middle and never really came to an end, leaving us stranded halfway through, utterly alone. Films were much the same. The films we loved seemed to have neither beginning nor end. Yet we found so much of ourselves in them. It was as though true art moved forward by defying the rules. These works pointed to the existence of another world within the one we inhabited. No art did this better than poetry itself. Years later, we understood that the books assigned to us as reading homework had been part of a secret alliance between the system and our families, designed to keep our mothers a little less occupied.
For some reason, summer had always been presented to us as a time when we could simply lie around and do nothing. And whenever we grew bored, we would wish for summer to come as quickly as possible. Our lives had been divided, rather unevenly, into two parts: summer and all the other seasons. Because of this misunderstanding, whenever we felt restless or found ourselves in difficulty, we would wait for summer to arrive, hoping to sleep more and do nothing at all. Then we grew up and realized that summer could hold so much more love. Summer was the incubation period for everything waiting to be done. You had to stay in the nest and keep the nest warm. Reading and learning were labors of love. A little like an unrequited, platonic romance.
Music was what best filled the emptiness of summer days. A pocket radio, music drifting up from the beach, the clicking of cassette players, the crackle of vinyl records, dance music playing in discotheques, the mysterious power of melodies to make the soul tremble, and so many other things—we discovered them all during those summer months. Sports, too, belonged to summer. The Olympic Games—how many Olympiads would fit into a lifetime?—were always held in summer. We had Munich, Montreal and Moscow. And what wonderful summers they were. We learned the names of athletes just as we learned the names of artists.
Then we grew up. We grew up beneath summer skies that seemed to stretch into eternity, watching, observing and learning. Those three months that had once felt like an old dream were gone. Everything now had to be squeezed into a month, or perhaps fifteen days. We worked. We all had to do something to make a living. Meanwhile, some people, depending on their circumstances and the positions they occupied, seemed to spend their entire lives on an endless holiday. We never cared much for rentiers.
Life went on without art, too. And yet art was the mirror that showed us ourselves. In every piece of music we listened to, every poem we read, every painting we looked at and every film we watched, we came to understand once again who and what we were—or simply that we were mortal beings. The photographs we encountered, meanwhile, were waiting in line to lead us astray. We had come to realize that photographs were not merely cold memories standing in for the mind. The photographs we looked at opened doors to new worlds. Were we certain we wanted to become photographers? Not really. But we wanted to take photographs. Simply appearing in photographs, being their static subjects, was no longer enough for us.
Art heals. It restores us, frees us from our troubles and makes us forget our sorrows. It reminds us of what we have forgotten. Whenever they have found themselves in difficulty, civilized people have sought answers within the boundaries of philosophy and art. They have followed the paths laid out by those who thought and wrote before them. Thought is a resource that can never be exhausted in this world. It is open to everyone, and it costs nothing. Virtue, conscience and reason all make their homes in the many layers of thought. True art, too, cannot move forward without thought grounded in knowledge.
Photography is an extraordinary art, no matter how heavily it leans on technology. Art is the most beautiful way of finding companions for our dreams. Photography has been brought into this world to make expression infinite, reaching universality through individual moments. Physics, chemistry, optics and digital technology form its backbone. Just as musical notes, seemingly no more than faint symbols, acquire meaning on a musical staff when arranged by a composer, technique helps give visual form to expression, allowing the photographer to develop a language of their own. Technique contains craftsmanship, and a good photographer must strike a balance between content and form.
In the end, to borrow an old expression, life too is a strip of film: thirty-six frames. If you push your luck a little, load the film carefully and close the camera back quickly, you might get thirty-eight photographs. Some of those photographs, however, will not come out sharp; they will be blurred. Some will be underexposed, disappearing into the black hole of the image; others will be overexposed, making us forget the details of what we have lived through. Both outcomes will leave the photographer unhappy.
Summer hurts. It reopens the wounds of the past, wounds that had long since scabbed over. For some, it is a time for holidays. A collection of days that seem endless, yet pass in the blink of an eye. It reminds us of the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. In our beautiful part of the world, summers are hot and dry, while winters are cold and wet. That is how we were taught. May it be a beautiful summer, one in which our lives meet photographs that are perfectly exposed.
