We're All Under The Same Sun
A camera isn’t just a camera.
It’s a window to the world. A ticket to the past. A bridge to the unknown. A keeper of moments. Yes, I know, every photographer says some version of this. Hallmark probably has a card for it. I’m going to say it anyway, because on this trip, my camera was all of these things.
This was a trip of contrasts; vibrant cities and struggling towns on the Danube.
I learned a little sumpin’ sumpin’ on this trip. First, my camera wasn’t just my raison d’être, it was my security blanket. I felt naked without it. I developed a certain photographer-chic in which I have mastered the ancient art of not getting garroted by my own gear: clothes, camera, jacket, backpack. In that order. To prevent death-by-strap. And it felt oddly comforting to have the weight of all of that wrapping me up like a burrito.
Second, I learned my camera is two-faced. Janus two-faced, not Mean Girls two-faced. It can root me in a place or float me above it—totally present or weirdly distant. I’m literally looking through something, and somehow, I’d never connected those dots.
On this trip, my camera did both. It put me in the heart of the hustle and bustle of the Spice Market in Istanbul and it gave me distance from the hard things - the Baba Vida fortress in Vidin, built to protect and defend from hundreds of years of conquests. The viewfinder became a filter, not just photographic but emotional.
In retrospect though, when my vision is clearly 20/20, I realized that my camera helped me see past the history and economic disparity to the things we all have in common.
The inexplicably cheerful colors we paint our houses.
The peeling trim around our doors that we swear we’ll get to.
The patterns and shapes we slap on everything we make, and clearly, curlicues have withstood the test of time.
The cooing that sounds the same in every language when we see adorable, stray cats.
The monuments we build to remind ourselves of the good, the bad, and our stubborn refusal to quit. (Gloria Gaynor would be proud.)
And of course, the light. The light that ties us all together.
Because we’re all under the same sun.
My camera turned me into a hunter of sorts, searching for the universal language that exists everywhere, from Vaci utca in Budapest to the ghost-town edges of Balkan villages. And here’s what surprised me: even in places marked by centuries of conquest and upheaval, human nature is absurdly consistent. We all speak the same language when it comes to building our world.
We build. We decorate. We watch things decay. We paint over the decay. We start again. Life is like owning a house—there’s no finish line, just an endless loop of fixing what fell apart while we were busy fixing something else. Rinse, repeat, persist.
Every day of this trip was different. Different scenery, different emotions. At the time, it felt like I wasn’t photographing much, so imagine my surprise to discover over 3000 images on my memory cards! So far, I have only processed photos from the first few days in Istanbul and Bucharest.
A trip of this magnitude and number of photographs will surely yield more than one essay. So, stay tuned!
Has your camera ever helped you to see a place differently?
-Denice