Hospitalised in the clinic where we’re working, as if I had set out to experience what patients feel when spending nights here – in my case due to an intestinal bacteria that made me reach almost 40°C, on the brink of delirium and with terrible diarrhoea – my thoughts autonomously created the following metaphor that I’m going to share with you.
But first, let me assure you – I’m perfectly fine now.
This unexpected hospital stay transported me back to the start of my university days, specifically to a mathematics professor I had in my first year of Biomedical Engineering. Sergio Abrahim Aabraham, a Mexican, wasn’t the most effective teacher, but he was an oratory genius. His non-mathematical insights were particularly captivating, which is why I often found myself in his office hours, armed with more questions than doubts.
I remember one of these sessions very well. I arrived to find a classmate, Irene – one of the top students in our year – already there. The professor’s first move was to compare us. Predictably, I came up short. But his intent wasn’t to highlight my shortcomings; rather, he wanted to illustrate that my struggle wasn’t with intellectual capacity, but with concentration.
To prove his point, he proposed a simple exercise: feel your heartbeat in each finger, one by one. By the time I detected the pulse in my first digit, Irene had already sensed it in all of hers. The professor advised me to practice this regularly, extending the exercise to my toes and other body parts as it became easier. I do it very often now.
The body is full of neuroreceptors that give us a lot of information of many types throughout the day. It’s a tremendous amount of stimuli. By doing this exercise, you manage to ignore all that information that you don’t want or need at that moment, and you feel what you choose to feel.
As I lay in that hospital bed, connected to an IV drip, I found myself applying this concept to my passion for photography. I prefer shooting in black and white, and suddenly, the parallel became clear. In both the heartbeat exercise and monochrome photography, the goal is to isolate the essential elements from a sea of information.
I’ve talked about this several times with a great friend who’s probably reading this. I photograph in black and white for many reasons. One of the main reasons is precisely because I seek to show that specific, clean stimulus. It can be a story, a gesture, a moment, or a composition. For me, it’s important not to show all that sea of stimuli that is colour, which, if not well worked, usually distracts and diverts attention to places where the information you intend to convey isn’t.
A good photograph, with a good frame and meaning, if the colour is poorly handled, will express almost nothing. Just as a simple photograph, without too much information, if the colour is well worked, can be a true visual wonder.
Other reasons are that I have no idea how to work in colour, and I’m not very interested in the information it provides. But in my delirium, the reason was rather that black and white shows the true heartbeat, the pulse, the essence of an image.
While I usually prefer the stark clarity of black and white photography, I’m attaching photos of the surgery in color because sometimes it happens – when subject, framing, light, and color harmoniously create a complete moment that demands to be seen in its full spectrum.
