Whilst walking towards the cathedral at twilight, I heard the sound of evensong emanating from within. For a moment, it felt as though the cathedral itself was singing. The glow from the west window seemed to add to the atmosphere - sound and light meeting within the fabric of the building. It made me feel connected.
I didn’t have my professional camera with me, so I took a photograph with what I had - an old iPhone.
Somehow, the digital noise and artefacts seem to add to the atmosphere. They give the photograph an ethereal quality, but they also lead me along a completely different tangent. There is something about their softness and imperfection that takes me back to an earlier age of photography - conjuring up the ghost of an old bellows camera.
The cathedral itself looks strangely vulnerable within the composition. It leans away from me, stretched upwards by perspective towards the heavens. It feels less like an object and more sentient. Perhaps that is partly because I had already heard it before I photographed it. The sound of evensong had somehow changed the way I saw the building - as something warm, soft and human.
This photograph reminds me of some words by the photographer Frederick H. Evans:
“Try for a record of emotion rather than a piece of topography. Wait till the building makes you feel intensely, in some special part of it or other then try and analyze what gives you that feeling... And see what your camera can do towards reproducing that effect.”
What those words mean to me is that photography begins before the camera is raised. It begins with being affected by something.
We don't need to have professional equipment with us to capture an emotion - sometimes worlds align, atmospheres become visible and we just have to record it from our perspective.
And in that sense, perhaps we are all photographers. We don’t need professional equipment to recognise and record an emotion. Sometimes the imperfections of the camera become part of what is felt.
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That aura, those echoes - the muted light is transporting. What a space to feel rooted in history. I'd love to make that journey myself; you've stirred the opera lover and architectural dreamer in me.
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