To me, first and foremost, is to enjoy being in a moment and doing something.
It's not a matter of whether you're going through something hard or easy.
The question is, are you enjoying yourself in a moment?
And if I'm enjoying myself and I am present in a moment, then I feel the work will speak
to that.
My name is Sarma Medinurj, I'm a writer, director, photographer.
I as a person who enjoys photography, not just taking photos, but enjoys other people's
photography, what always stays with me is stories attached to images, or at least the
story I can place in an image.
So an image, for example, of the lady standing in that road does evoke a lot of questions.
It evokes a certain emotional response, but it also begs to ask what she was doing there
and who she is.
It's sort of a lonely figure in the middle of a road with what looks like a snowstorm,
actually a hail storm, and she must have gone through an enormous amount of pain being on
that road, because I stepped out for two seconds and I didn't want to be out there.
That very much sort of captures who she was.
She has no fear of that moment whatsoever anymore.
She has no fear of pain or regard for it all that much.
She's kind of embraced it, which makes her very interesting and very different.
I mean, I don't think too many people that were taken here would have done what she did.
I often go to places that I could probably end up dead being there.
If it's something that draws me and I'm emotionally, spiritually drawn to a certain place, no
matter how dangerous it is, you just go and do it.
And that's one of the important sort of lessons of my childhood, is to be free of these sort
of common unnecessary fears about daily life stuff.
One big problem that I see in this day and age is that everybody seems to be depressed.
Well, going through those experiences and eventually it'll center you.
That's kind of how it's felt.
Still shots was very easy.
You could carry a camera with you and then occasionally take a shot or two.
So I started doing some landscapes that way and then eventually started working with people.
That kind of translated to it because to me, going into nature was a way to sort of recharge
batteries.
As I said with cities is they exhaust you after a while.
What I started doing is taking people out of cities and out of their sort of rhythm
of daily life or you want to call it a grind and take them out somewhere into some kind
of a location to sort of displace them out of their nine to five existence.
When you take them out of nature, they wouldn't know what to do often.
They would ask me like, what should I be doing?
And then I'd be like, well, whatever you want to be doing.
She had these recurring dreams of waking up in different places with bedsheets.
And one of those places she said was a beach somewhere.
And we got over there and me being somebody that's constantly on the road, I wasn't following
with the news all that much.
And one of the hurricanes was moving up the coast, right?
The storm rolled in with these thunderbolts that were just massive.
Like they came down and it would blind you.
And then suddenly the islands started flooding.
So eventually we find ourselves sitting there and there was no more island visible.
We just happened to be in the ocean.
As bad as that sounds, it's actually quite liberating.
It was at some point, you say, screw it.
I'm not afraid that so whatever happens happens.
So that's the sort of beauty of it all.
That's kind of how photography started.
It was a way of capturing moments as to remember them pretty much for me.
It was a way of, you know, some people might take a pen and write something down.
For me, it was taking a shot of a particular moment.
And that that became a whole project, right, because I would take them out on their shoots
and they would get their moments.
That ended up going on for about four years off and on, that I would probably have photographed.
But think about a thousand people.
A thousand, I think, is a very conservative number of how many shoots there were.
I kind of lost track of it.
That's kind of at the heart of it.
You know, this is my most valuable experience as a kid and I would love to somehow have
other people have the same experience.
It's not in the tragic way that I had it, but in this beautiful way they can have them.
