I got “The Question” again the other day.
Home from another trip I was greeting a young visitor to our gallery who was taking in all the images on the walls and in the card racks from my assignments for National Geographic. They were eager, drinking in the images like a thirsty man in a desert, going down the wall stopping first at images of Easter Island, then on to Africa, Syria, Wales, Venice and the Arctic. I could see the question coming.
And I don’t doubt that every National Geographic photographer gets exactly the same question time and again. “Of all the places you’ve been in the world, what’s your favorite place?”
It’s a simple question and for me the answer is simple: The Celtic World. But from the puzzled look in their eye I can tell my answer is puzzling. And so I go on. That would be Scotland and Ireland, Wales and Cornwall (with the wee Isle of Man thrown in) as well as Brittany in France and even Galicia in Spain. It’s all the wild, rugged western edge of Europe, the last lands left to my Celtic ancestors as they were squeezed out the edge of the Atlantic, their backs to the sea on no place to go.
Warming to the task I grab several of the cards from the rack, of places like the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and the West Coast of Ireland, wild ponies on the moors of North Uist, an iron age fort and the Aran Islands, the heartbreaking abandonment of St. Kilda. I show them Bannatyne MacLeod who spoke Gaelic to his sheep on the Isle of Harris, and Johnny Buchanan who let me ride in his rowboat as he hauled his sheep to their summer grazing on a tiny island. Maybe I’ll introduce them to the kilted giants of the Highland Games at Glenfinnan or the pleasures of tasting whisky straight from the cask in the distillery warehouse on Islay.
By now, they may be looking at me like I’m daft. (And I don’t blame them.) But I’m trying to show them that it’s the culture, just as much as the place, that draws me back.
If I think they really want to know more I’ll plunge headlong into the delights of Celtic festivals like the fire festival of Beltaine in Edinburgh where near-naked men in red body paint assaulted the May Queen and her virtuous entourage at midnight. Or maybe I’ll wax poetic about the pleasures of an island Ceilidh where we danced until three in the morning and the ferry took us back to our island as the sun rose over Orkney.
It’s not fair, I suppose. Here all they wanted was the name of a nice place that I like and now they’re being dragged headlong into a lifelong passion by someone who is getting all mushy and dewy eyed. If I had just said “Tibet” they would have been happy.
But love affairs are never like that for National Geographic photographers. We don’t always get to pick the places we love, sometime they pick us. And I didn’t start out knowing that I loved the Celtic world. It grew on me over some twenty or more trips back. (I’ve lost count.) Indeed, when I started going there I didn’t even realize such a thing as the “Celtic World” existed.
Most of all, it is the going back, over and over, again and again, that unlocks the heart of the place. How else would I come to know the times on Luskentyre Strand when the tides leave the beach broad and endless rimmed by wildflowers in the machair on one side and the turquoise waters loitering in the afternoon on the other? How else would I tune my eye and my mind to the infinite nuances of this place?
If I’m crazy at least I have the comfort of knowing that I’m not alone. Many of my photographer friends at National Geographic seem to be dingy in just the same way. Obsessed by some piece of the world, some slice of existence, that consumes them in a very satisfying way, taking over their lives, and to which they return like a lost puppy happy to be home.
(Of course with that knowledge comes burden as well, to love honestly and clearly, never denying the truth of the place, sharing it honestly with our pictures and hoping to make a difference when we get the chance. But that’s another discussion and I’ll not burden my gallery guest on these points.)
To be honest I don’t go this far very often. I don’t tell this to many people. They would think I am a sentimental fool and they might right. It’s the rare one that wants to know what it’s really like to be a photographer locked in communion with one place in the world.
And that’s not what they wanted to know. But that’s what I want to tell them.