I left a six month old baby at home to chase this thing. Let that sit in your chest for a minute. I walked away from someone who doesn’t understand time yet, who won’t remember your absence but felt it in their bones anyway, to go stand on a volcano with a dancer and a camera.
So ask I have to ask myself in the most silent, most honest hour I can stomach: was it necessary? Did I have to go, or was I running? Because there’s a difference between necessity and escape, and a six-month-old can’t tell the difference but I sure as shit can.
Here’s the fear nobody mentions about travel: it’s not just the vague dread of being far from familiar comforts. It’s the specific, named terror of what I left behind. What might happen while I’m gone. What I might miss that can never be retrieved. That shadow I can’t escape? It’s not just my neuroses and my vision problems. It’s also a baby’s face, the weight of their need, the sound they make that only I know how to answer.
I carried that to the Indian Ocean. It was there on top of the volcano whether I want to admit it or not. Every frame I shot, that abandonment was in it. Not abandonment like neglect. Abandonment like the necessary, terrible choice to pursue the thing that commands me even when it costs something irreplaceable.
So when I’m digging into myself for the deep answer about why I make images, I need to include this: Would I leave a six-month-old to do it? Did I? And if the answer is yes, if I looked at that sleeping baby and still got on the plane, then I better make sure what I brought back was worth it. Not worth it in some marketplace sense, but necessary in my bones. Born from compulsion so deep I’d sacrifice presence for it.
The spiritual testing isn’t just about being far from my habits. It’s about being far from the person who needs me most, who can’t understand why I’m not there. That’s the graver science. That’s what brings me back to yourself. Not as some free agent artist pursuing vision, but as someone who chose this hunger over that specific human being, at that specific unrepeatable moment in their development.
The dancer on that volcano was making shapes in space that would disappear. I was capturing moments that would vanish. Meanwhile, a six month old was becoming a seven-month-old without me there to witness it. I can never get that back. Travel won’t erase that choice. Distance won’t justify it. My shadow knows what I did.
So describe it with humble, ruthless sincerity: what I saw and felt and loved and lost and abandoned to be there. The way volcanic rock felt under my feet while someone else was probably walking my baby in circles at 3 AM. The specific quality of light through jungle canopy while I was missing the specific quality of light through the nursery window at dawn.
If my ordinary life with that baby felt poor compared to the adventure, don’t blame the life. Blame myself. Admit I’m not poet enough yet to call forth the richness of a six-month-old’s laugh, the tragedy and comedy of a diaper change, the volcanic emotional landscape of early parenthood. Because for a real creator, there’s no poverty in that, no indifferent subject matter.
But I went anyway. And if it was necessity, if I would have died inside if I hadn’t gone, if the impulse to make those images was as demanding as the impulse to care for my child, then build my life in accordance with that truth. Own the brutality of it. Don’t hide behind pretty justifications about art and purpose.
The images that came from this trip are good only if they arose from genuine necessity. Only if they’re worth what they cost. Only if they contain not just the dancer and the volcano and the jungle, but also the ghost of what I left behind. The fear. The guilt. The shadow that followed me there and back.
That’s the only way to judge them. Did they have to exist? Were they worth a piece of my child’s infancy that I can never reclaim? The volcano knows the answer. So do the dancers. So does the baby, in ways they won’t be able to articulate for years.
So do I.