An exposure, when it finally happens, is never the beginning.
It is the end, in the sense that, the point where countless small internal currents collapse into a single moment of recognition.
I never stand before a scene searching for alternatives. I don’t chase “better angles,” I don’t circle around looking for variations, and I almost never make a second exposure. Long before the shutter clicks, everything that could respond to the world in front of me has already begun to move inside me: memory, intuition, restlessness, longing, questions I don’t yet know how to articulate.
When the elements align: light, form, distance, time, breath, the photograph isn’t discovered. It is remembered.
The scene does not show me a picture; it triggers something older than the moment itself. A feeling, an unfinished thought, a residue of time. And when all of that gathers into one point, there is only one possible frame. Only one possible exposure. Only one possible ending.
The shutter is nothing more than the execution of a decision made long before my hands touch the camera. In that instant, that click, time ends. It ends because the image has already existed within me, however briefly, before the film ever sees the light. This is why I don’t believe in “seeing the final print” the way Weston or Adams described it. The print is not the truth, it’s an echo of the truth.
And echoes change.
The same negative can produce different prints in different years, because I am not the same in different years. My memory of the moment changes. My relationship to the scene changes. My understanding of myself changes. And the print, obedient and honest, follows.
But the negative, that first exposure, is fixed. It is the one unrepeatable meeting of the inner and the outer world. A small Big Bang in reverse: everything that was inside collapses into a single point, and then stops.
The exposure is not the beginning of anything. It is a conclusion. A quiet, final punctuation mark at the end of a thought that never needed more than one sentence.