So for now, I'm going to talk about one picture. It's a shot of the pathway that runs between the two outer walls at La Cite', the medieval heart of Carcassonne, France. This is one of the pictures I think back to when I am asked how I got into photography and/or where I studied. I did eventually attend some photography classes at the University of Memphis, but I am largely self taught. I learned my craft on the streets of Europe, caressing the castles and feeling the fjords, living out of a backpack on a shoestring budget for weeks at a time. I used to do this every year. My friend Jeff was on most of the trips with me. You can see some of his work here. I remember walking the streets of Paris after having just got off of the plane, thinking "Wow. We're actually doing this." I feel like I was walking around in a stupor for those first 3 days in Paris. I remember a lot of it, but at the time, I was still taking it all in and didn't get many photographs of any real quality. I wasn't a "photographer" then. I was just another tourist with a 35mm point-and-shoot camera. So we left Paris by way of the Eurail train and ventured into the French countryside. Our destination was Carcassonne, the perfect medieval city.
We arrived in Carcassonne very late in the day, communicated with a cab driver enough to get to the gates of La Cite'. We grabbed a sandwich at a nearby deli and headed for the Youth Hostel. Walking the outer walls later that night is still among my favorite memories from any of my travels, and the next morning when we woke, we headed right back to the walls to grab a few pictures. This is what I cam back with. I think this is the only one I took from that spot. Nowadays I'd take several and try a few different angles, but I didn't know any better back then. I'd see something interesting, take one shot and move on. This one stands out to me because it is one of the few that I just had everything lined up dead center in the frame. On most of my shots at that time, I felt compelled to compose nearly every shot off center, as if there were hard and fast rules that stated a subject could not be photographed dead on. I wanted to come back with good photographs and had gathered a few tips. For the most part, I knew just enough to complicate matters and make things more difficult. But on this shot, I forgot all of that and just shot the picture.
After the trip, I came to realize that I knew very little of photography but desperately wanted to learn more. It was intimidating to say the least, but browsing the work of masters like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz was enough to convince me that it would be worth whatever time, energy and money would be spent to cultivate some real knowledge and skills.
I would return to Carcassonne two years later, a seasoned photographer, having spent nearly every waking hour for the past two years studying photography and the art of seeing. I photographed this location again and did no better than this shot from the first trip. I didn't think much of it at the time, but when I think back now, this is the shot where it really all began. This was the shot where I forgot about the handful of "rules" I had learned and just shot it the way it looked best to me. I know now that I had unknowingly shot from my heart. I find it ironic that I would come to that revelation from a shot like this, a simple bullseye of the splendor that lay in front of me.
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