Vol. 10 No. 21 (2023): Essays of Geography
Daiya River, Nikko, Tochigi, Japan, March 14, 2019.
This photo tells a story and a half.
Immediately, it portrays a man in the vastness, looking at something unseen. Obviously, it also portrays my perspective and engages with what led me there. For my part, the story is not very different from all the love and separation stories we know: with a broken heart, I found myself going to Japan to study, and with a broken heart again, I found myself traveling to Nikko to rest. While my main activity had been learning to speak the language and understand a culture foreign to me, my trip to Nikko was an attempt to escape; I wanted to find some silence to listen to myself.
This image was one of the first that struck me during the trip: a river much larger than most I had seen — I hadn't had the opportunity to see the enormous Brazilian rivers until then, having only the small streams of the interior of Rio de Janeiro in my memory — but transformed by human action. It was preserved nature, yet tamed. Like a huge garden constructed there. My gaze was naturally contemplative. I was trying to contemplate there what I couldn't, at the time, contemplate within myself: this nature under control.
And in the midst of all this nature was half a story more. Half because I can't tell it fully, as I don't know it. However, there it was, materialized in a man occupying a rather unusual position. The access was not complicated, but it wasn't simple either. What caught my attention most, however, was that he was not looking — or at least did not seem to be looking — contemplatively at the river. On the contrary, his gaze seemed focused, as if he were searching for or observing something. I don't know and can't know what that something was; or what that man was doing there in the middle of the week. That’s the other half of the story.
It was in the face of this contrast, between my contemplative gaze and the man's focused gaze, that it occurred to me, unassumingly, to take this photo. I took thousands of photos with this camera — including for the first time — that day, but this is one I always remember. It reminds me that sometimes, when I look at the world searching for something, I might find another way of looking too.
Canon SX 430IS. Lens 4.3 - 193.5mm
Daniel Henrique Bernar Freitas
Physics Teacher for Youth and Adults
Contact: daniel.hbfreitas@gmail.com
