Beyond the lens
What does it mean for a photographer to see, to remember, and to bear witness?
So, what does it take to call yourself a photographer?
Is it just owning a camera? Is it knowing the settings by heart? Is it being recognised for your work?
Or is it that instinct to stop and notice the way light lingers, the way silence presents itself, the urge to remember something before it is gone?
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Or maybe it is none of those things at all. Maybe it is simply seeing beauty. And admiring.
World Photography Day is celebrated every year on 19 August. It marks the day in 1839 when France officially introduced the Daguerreotype, one of the earliest practical forms of photography, to the world.
Nearly two centuries on, the world marks the occasion as a celebration of everything photography has since made possible: capturing moments, telling stories and documenting history in ways words alone cannot. Right?
Every photograph begins with a choice, and that choice happens before the camera ever reaches your eye.
It is the decision to stop, to look and to ask what story deserves to be told in this particular frame. This is exactly what separates a snapshot from a narrative.
Photography has always been more about the human eye behind it, the brain deciding what matters and the intention to preserve something fleeting. A photograph can freeze a moment and still hold an entire story inside a single frame. That's the paradox - that stillness can contain motion, silence can contain sound, and one image can contain multitudes.
Only the person behind the lens carries the full account of what happened, and sometimes that account has almost nothing to do with what the frame shows. A picture and its backstory can sit worlds apart or fold perfectly into each other. There is no limit to how close or how distant the two can be.
I, for one, love taking pictures of anything and everything. A flying bird. A small leaf. A yawning cat. A shadow on the wall.
They say a picture speaks a thousand words, and that is also my philosophy towards writing. The pictures I take motivate me to write. How can one not write about pictures?
What are pictures if not vessels that transport you back to moments you have lived?
Photography has taught me to actually see. The simple act of raising a camera and framing a shot has made me notice the beauty I would otherwise walk right past. Part of this comes from a strange personal quirk: I need glasses but hate to wear them all the time. Details slip past me constantly because of it.
A camera lens, though, gives me a different way of looking at things, pulling me out of the narrow, overstimulated tunnel vision most of us live in.
A flower petal, up close, turns out to be majestically beautiful. So does a leaf. Ordinary things that never register to us when they are just background suddenly reveal themselves the moment you put them in focus.
Pictures tell striking stories too. Stand in one spot and take a photo. Wait five minutes and take another. The difference between the two will not be that hard to spot. Or skip the waiting entirely: pull out your phone, tap the screen at different points and watch how the light shifts with each change in focus. It feels like a metaphor for life itself.
Stand in the same place at two different points in your life, and you could end up somewhere completely different.
Sometimes your whole trajectory depends on one small decision made on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, a decision that felt like nothing at the time. Or just a thought that wandered in and decided to stay, whether you noticed it consciously or not. Just like a capture.
There is another parallel I keep thinking about: the things outside your control that quietly overpower everything else. Too much light. Too little light.
Objects arranged by pure chance in a way that doesn't really make sense, no matter how you angle yourself around them. Life works the same way sometimes. Nothing lines up the way you hoped. Nothing sits neatly inside the frame you imagined. You still have to capture the moment and trust that you can fix it later in post-processing. Perhaps.
A picture, once taken, can usually be salvaged somehow. But the real task is capturing it in the first place, because once that moment passes, it is gone. You do not get a second chance to see what you saw or to make it right.
For Rajib Dhar, senior staff photojournalist at The Business Standard and a freelance photojournalist for the Associated Press, one of the most meaningful aspects of his work is its ability to create a tangible impact on people's lives.
"One of my biggest achievements is that, through my work, many disadvantaged people have received what they were entitled to. For example, I reported for TBS where the horses that used to carry tourists were sometimes abandoned when they were old.
"After the story on the abandoned horses was published in TBS and received recognition, the Cox's Bazar deputy commissioner called the horse owners in and warned them. They were told that their licences could be cancelled if they continued abandoning horses. Since then, owners have stopped abandoning older horses and are providing them with treatment instead," he said.
Rajib mentioned that photojournalism requires both courage and a willingness to take on challenges to continue in the profession.
Reflecting on the 2024 July Uprising, he said the experience came at a personal cost. "There are still five pellets from a single gunshot lodged in my body from the July Uprising. But it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment. I had to work and cover the uprising."
Rajib said such experiences have strengthened his sense of social responsibility. His work has also encouraged him to think more deeply about the issues he documents and consider their potential impact in the future.
For aspiring photojournalists, he believes, passion should be the starting point. "You have to have passion to do photojournalism," he said, adding that the profession is evolving in an age of globalisation.
Perhaps, then, being a photographer is not really about having the right camera, mastering every setting or even knowing exactly what makes a photograph memorable. It is about learning to look closely, choosing what deserves to be seen and understanding what that choice means.
Photographs make us notice what we would otherwise overlook, remember what might otherwise be forgotten and, sometimes, change what happens next.
Just keep finding moments worth capturing. Because that's all that matters.
