I went out without my camera.
A few years earlier, this would have ignited my insecurities.
Am I still a photographer when I’m stripped of the camera?
What if something happens and I need to take a picture?
On this sunny afternoon, I abandoned my camera on purpose. I was in Cinque Terre with one of my oldest friends, a brilliantly talented photographer. We walked. We talked. We stopped. We ate. Then we walked again. We reached the bottom of the hill and stood facing the sea.
I felt small in front of the landscape. Not in a romantic way, but in a physical one. The scale of it. The clarity. The kind of beauty that makes your chest tighten before you’ve had time to think. I remember turning to her and saying, almost instinctively: I regret not bringing my camera.
She looked at me with that cheeky smile, her eyes bright and amused, and said something I’ve carried with me ever since.
What if we describe the photograph we would take?
So we stood there, on the edge of it all, as the sun began to drop into the west. The clouds settled into a slow formation, somewhere between pink and orange. I lifted my hands to my eyes, forming a rectangle, mimicking the camera’s viewfinder.
And I described the picture.
The horizon line. The small boat suspended in the distance. A bird entering the frame, not centred, but necessary. The way the light moved across the water, not evenly, but in patches. I described what I would keep. What I would exclude. Where I would stand. When I would stop.
In that moment, something became clear to me.
The photograph already existed.
What I understand more clearly now is that a photograph is not a reaction.
It is a decision.
A decision shaped by who we are long before we arrive at the frame.
We carry our upbringing into the picture. The voices that raised us. The places that steadied us and the ones that unsettled us. A lingering sense of home and belonging, or its absence, quietly directs what we recognise as meaningful. So does our relationship to chaos and harmony, to order and rupture, to silence and noise.
This is where authorship lives.
Not in the camera, but in the psychological space where the eye notices, the heart responds and the mind decides whether to stay or stray. Every photograph is a negotiation: what the eye sees, what the heart feels, what the brain can hold.
Bias is embedded in that negotiation. Not as something to erase, but something to acknowledge. Bias appears in where we pause. In what feels familiar enough to approach or unfamiliar enough to avoid. In what we frame with care, and what we let slip past unnoticed. Even neutrality is a position. Even distance is a choice.
As the anniversary of the Egyptian revolution of January 25th, 2011 draws near, I find myself thinking about bias, not as a flaw in photography, but as something that quietly lives inside every frame.
When I photographed the revolution in Cairo, my bias was not theoretical, it was embodied. I was photographing a place that had raised me, a language that shaped my inner voice, a city that lived in my muscle memory. I wasn’t neutral and I didn’t want to be. My sense of justice, fear, hope and belonging all pressed against the frame. I was drawn to moments of collective courage, to tenderness amid chaos, to people standing their ground with dignity.
But I was also influenced, more than I wanted to admit at the time, by the news I was reading and the Egyptian television I was watching, by the way it tried to flatten protesters into troublemakers, or suggest they were shaped by external agendas, or reduced to a single political vision.
At some point, I felt myself pushing back through the camera. I began turning away from certain images, men with beards and women in hijabs, not because they didn’t belong, but because I was trying to insist on something the broadcasts refused to admit: that the movement was broader than one story and carried Egyptians from different walks of life.
Even that urge to correct the narrative became its own kind of bias.
The revolution was not something I observed from the outside. It was something I moved through, with my body and my heart fully involved. That closeness shaped every decision I made, where I stood, when I lifted the camera and when I couldn’t.
We like to believe photographs are about what’s in front of us. But they are just as much about what we carry inside. Our past and present are folded into every decision: the distance we keep, the closeness we allow, the moment we decide this is worth holding onto.
In that sense, we are the pictures we make.
They carry our rhythms, our hesitations, our longings. They reveal our inner weather as much as the external world. And sometimes, the most honest photographs are the ones that remain internal, fully formed, deeply felt and never recorded.
That imagined photograph in Cinque Terre taught me that authorship doesn’t require proof. It requires feeling and presence. Attention. And the courage to connect with what moves us before we try to show it.
— ⟡ —
A song for this piece:
Words Remain, Moderator & Josh Garrels
Listen on Spotify
An Invitation
Think of a photograph you never took, one that lives clearly in your mind, even without an image to show for it.
Describe it, or make it now.
If you’d like to share, reply with one image or a short description and a single sentence about why it holds home for you.