It was one of those accidental evenings that becomes permanent in memory, not because anything grand happened, but because something true did.
I was sitting in a folding IKEA chair (the kind that never lets you forget you’re sitting in it) in front of a small art gallery tucked between a café that made surprisingly bad coffee and a record shop that hadn’t updated its window display since the Clinton administration.
My friend, a glassblower with working hands and eyes glazed from years in front of a kiln, leaned back in his own chair, one foot hooked behind the other like a man who has known too much and carries it lightly. I had my camera on my lap, the strap looped around my wrist as if to remind me of who I was when words failed me.
We were talking about photography. Or rather, I was talking, in the way artists do when they are trying to explain their compulsions to someone who already understands them but is generous enough to listen anyway. I told him I loved photographing people. Not things. And he tilted his head like he was waiting for the real reason to show itself. So I tried again.
When I photograph people, I said, I’m not capturing how they look. I’m searching for the quiet truth of the soul buried under that edifice that we all have learned to show the world. A moment when the curtain falls and what’s left is something unguarded. I try to catch that.
It’s not always visible. Sometimes it’s hiding behind a wrinkle or a glance or a half-smile. But when I do find it, it feels like truth. Not truth like facts on paper, but the kind that only the soul recognizes. The photograph becomes a conversation between their essence and mine. Two souls, not just one.
But things, I said. Things have no soul. A chair, a spoon, a brick wall; when I photograph those, there’s only me. It becomes a mirror. The image says more about me than about the object. It’s all my projection. With people, it’s both of us in the frame. There’s communion. A third thing is born.
He nodded, took a sip of his beer, and said nothing for a while. The silence wasn’t empty. It was loaded, like a bow drawn back but not yet released. Then he told me a story. He had been to an Apache tracking school, somewhere out west. Dirt and sagebrush country. Long days and longer silences. He said they taught you to track by feeling. Not just seeing marks in the dirt, but sensing the presence that had passed through. Reading the land like breath on glass. One of the old teachers had told him, Everything leaves something behind. Because everything is alive. Trees, rocks, even the wind. There is soul in all of it. It’s just our sense of self that blinds us to it.
And I sat there, somewhere between astonishment and recollection, because there it was. That moment. The kind that made me feel like I was in a lost chapter from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or maybe having a conversation with Socrates disguised as a guy with nicotine-stained fingers. A man who had blown glass into sacred shapes and maybe, knowingly or unknowingly, had blown some of himself into every one of them.
It was a moment of pure clarity, where all the theories and distractions fell away. There was no gallery. No beer. No folding chairs. Just a sense of something unshakable at the center of everything. A kind of bedrock truth. The kind you don’t argue with. The kind that sits behind your eyes and waits for you to notice it.
Truth, I remembered, isn’t something you learn. It’s something you recognize. And the recognition usually comes in these quiet, ordinary places; on sidewalks, in workshops, at the edge of someone else’s cigarette smoke. It’s not complicated. It’s just covered up most of the time. By ego. By noise. By all the things we mistake for meaning.
We have to peel those layers back. Whether through art, or long walks, or tinkering with an engine until it purrs again. Each of us needs a practice, a way of excavating. Because if we never arrive at that core experience, if we never touch what truth actually feels like, then everything else we build is floating. Untethered. At risk of being blown away.
Art is one doorway. So is craftsmanship. So is silence.
The photograph, it turns out, is never just of a thing or a person. It is of a moment in which soul met soul, or at least, where one became still enough to glimpse the other. And if that moment is real, then everything else, for just a second, can be too.
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