Since May, I more or less gave up photographing. The unease I have been feeling about it had been lurking beneath the surface of my consciousness for quite some time. Until, one day—“In wond’rous, lovely month of May / When every garden tree was blooming”¹ —I finally admitted to myself that I no longer found any pleasure in it. And I had no pleasure because my own photographs no longer meant anything to me.

Gone was the time when I acted under the motto of the wonderful British singer Kathleen Ferrier (check YouTube for her moving recording of Mahler’s Urlicht from Symphony No. 2, as well as the BBC documentary about her, An Ordinary Diva): “It is not enough to be devoted; you need to be possessed.”

I found myself taking the same kind of pictures as many others—just another voice in the already noisy and cluttered agora of photographs. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t—and still can’t—see things differently. I was and still am stuck. This undermined my motivation to go out, until I nearly gave up completely. For two months, I didn’t take the camera out of my backpack. October has now passed, and I felt no urge to go out for the autumn foliage. I’m sure the big names out there did just that and produced great stuff. There’s really no need for me to add more to it.

The next logical step was to deactivate my Instagram account. Not only was I seeing more pictures than my brain could process or my need for beauty could digest, but for each photograph, the algorithms showed me twenty more funny, useless videos that kept me glued to my smartphone. The interactions with followers felt like polite nods—like greeting fellow mountaineers on a trail simply because tradition demands it. A beautiful tradition, which quickly becomes boring when you make the mistake of choosing well-trodden paths…

I don’t miss social media (yet), and I don’t miss photography. Well, the latter is only partly true. It doesn’t make me happy that I’ve more or less given up, but I certainly don’t miss the way I used to push myself to go out as often as I could, feeling a pang of guilt if I didn’t. And all that effort, only to look later at the photos and ask myself: “What sense does any of this have? And if it has no meaning to me, why would it have meaning for others?”

Of course, when I’m out in the field—or in the mountains—what I see still stirs some aesthetic emotion in me, and I react by grabbing the camera. But at some point, I started thinking about something a musicologist—well known during my university time three decades ago—said in one of his lectures: “To feel emotion when hearing a piece of music is to stay at the most superficial level of this art. Music is not about emotions; it’s about ideas.” That phrase stayed with me and now pops into my mind each time I take pictures.

Wait a second—did I just use the present tense? Well, that’s because of course I still do photograph. Every time the desire to go out slightly outweighs the discomfort of doing so, I seize the moment and head out. I’ve simply accepted that this means I don’t go out so often anymore. Two weeks ago I woke up two times at 3.30 AM to ascent to an alpine lake before the sunrise. I didn’t have any photographic expectations and I wasn’t dissapointed: the sky was perfectly blue on the first morning and perfectly white on the second.

So maybe “giving up” isn’t the right term—perhaps “letting go” is more accurate. After all, creative dents are inevitable (and maybe even necessary). They happen to great artists as well and who am I to complain?! Only, some never come out of the trough.