Taking pictures, giving attention

A while back I started an instagram feed. The plan was to post a daily photo showing city nature: the invited guests, the gatecrashers and all the enrichments of weather and time in the urban environment. I thought it would be a new way for me to bang on about how nature is everywhere, all the time. After all, it's probably time my friends and family got a rest from being  sole audience for my 'Ooo look!' moments.

But something unexpected happened, two things really. One is that by setting this most minute of intentions I have turned my passive attention into active looking. I am seeing more.

The second and more important change happened after a week or so when I reviewed the images as a group. The nature moments in my life have so far been entirely accidental and incidental: a series of interruptions. When I reviewed the first few days' worth of images, 'oo, raindrops',  'look, amazing clouds' suddenly joined up into a thread: a whole narrative of my nature-life came into focus.  Intermittent tapping has resolved into a rhythmn.

I generally think of my life as mostly consisting of my family, job, friends, creative projects, and the routes I usually walk or drive between them. Which is of course what it mostly is, but now I have a much stronger awareness of the physical sub-plot.

When I review my images, I see my life without all the social parts. I bring the physical world I inhabit to the fore - something that my life of relative first world ease allows me to ignore a lot. I don't worry about cold, hunger and pain because I have jumpers, supermarkets and painkillers. The  physical world just doesn't impinge much on my knowledge worker's urban lifestyle, but the physical world is full of incontrovertible truth. It just is. No blame, nothing owed: just physics and biology, playing out.

As the images pile up their glimpses of weeds, gulls and clouds, I am gathering a sense of perspective, a bit like when you look up at the night sky. The distant majesty of stars melts away the hot little immediacies of human life: what does it matter?

Nature photos offer a friendlier dose of perspective than the stars. I matter to the weeds in my drive in a way that I obviously don't to Orion in the sky. I'm not going to decide when to pull him up by the roots to save the brickwork. But social awkwardness, unimpressive cooking, or a messy house are just as irrelevant to the weeds as to Orion. I like them for it. I'm going to keep paying them and their city nature colleagues my photographic attention.

If you want to see what I see, you're very welcome @southamptonstarling