The benches

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

USA | Monday, October 18, 2010 | 5 photos

Since I came to Richmond, Virginia last summer for studying from South Korea, sitting on street benches and seeing people has become one of my hobbies. Although I often sat on benches on streets, most times, I did not care about how the benches looked like. Instead, I just checked how clean they were.
One of things that my camera does to me is that it helps me see something more carefully. When I looked at the street benches through my camera lens, I noticed that a bench itself was a space, which had a volume. They were the structures that had columns, ceilings and void walls with stripe shapes of the black steels. So, in daytime, they made the shadows on the ground within their space.
Repeated patterns of shadows from the benches draw my attention. The boundaries between the benches and their shadows were blurred, and as a result, the benches and the shadows became unified objects. They changed their shapes and patterns by the time of the day and the camera angles. I laughed when I realized that while I was sitting on the benches, there were the dynamic transformations of the shadows under my seat.
The camera gives me the different ways of seeing daily experiences. It makes new encounters between the objects and me, and I believe this is the joy of the taking pictures. I am still in the process of leaning photography, and since I enjoyed taking pictures, I have realized that the important matter is not what I see, but how I see. One of my professors says that nothing is boring, and I feel this is so true. Even if the final destination would not be Bhutan but somewhere like the ordinary places near my house, I believe a good photographer’s pictures can be still extraordinary. I want to be a good photographer, and this is a wonderful opportunity to grow to be a good photographer.