Years for a second

For my book Henro, I spent four weeks taking photographs along the pilgrimage route on Shikoku, Japan. Halfway through, I was sure I would come home empty-handed. I had been a photographer for fifteen years by then, and it took me a while to realise that this experience was part of the problem.

Much of my work stems from moments that I could not have planned. People call that luck, and in part it is. The moment itself is out of my hands. Whether or not I am ready for it when it comes is another matter entirely, and achieving that readiness has taken me years. For a long time, I thought I knew what it was made of. Shikoku taught me that that was only half of it.

In the rest of this piece I go back to moments in my work that lasted about a second, like a stack of jerrycans falling over in Uganda and a shape falling from Tino’s head. I write about how I learned to be ready for moments like that, and about the two times it stopped working. Once in Morocco, at the very start of my career, when I walked into the medina and could not see anything. And once on Shikoku, where fifteen years of experience got in the way, until someone walking past me became the cover of the book.

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