A Soul Searcher: Stardust

To tell the truth, I was thinking for a long time about sending the latest series of photographs here or not. The question arose "Why?". I began to think, and my thoughts drifted far beyond the simple question "Why?». I began to wonder, but in general, what or who motivates us to do something? Think about something or someone? To spend time and energy on something or someone? What is the meaning of everything that surrounds us, what is happening to us? What is the meaning of our life? God? Love? Nature? Energy? The universe? Knowledge? Time? Past, present, future? In everything or there is no meaning at all?

And perhaps I just need to start from the very beginning, and the answer will come by itself.

The new year 2021 has started hard enough for me: so many illusions of the past have collapsed like a glass castle that I have been building for years. The reality was very different from what I had thought. I was finally starting to see things as they are and have been for so long, but I didn't notice, or just didn't want to notice it. It's shocking. It hurts. Admitting and accepting your mistakes is hard, but letting go and moving on is even harder.

I decided to run away. To escape from this pain, from this unpleasant reality attacking from all sides. Escape from myself and temporarily forget everything. I escaped to Stepantsminda. This was not part of my plan, but something inside me told me that I should leave everything and just go… I got ready in 30 minutes. Before I left, I grabbed the camera and the films that were lying on the table.

Stepantsminda is a small town located in the northeastern region of Georgia at an altitude of 1740 meters above sea level. The name itself literally means «Saint Stephan». It was named so after a Georgian Orthodox monk Stephan, who constructed a hermitage at this location on what later became the Georgian Military Highway.

During the pandemic, Stepantsminda was as empty as the Sahara Desert: not a single tourist. On the street you could only meet local residents, various animals, rare cars and abandoned houses. I spent 7 days here, where most of the time I walked around the area, exploring it, climbing mountains, visiting monasteries and churches, and just talking to the locals.

I didn't get away from myself for long. When you travel all alone, the thoughts of the past always remind you of themselves periodically. I thought that if something inside me had brought me here, then the solution had to be found here as well.

Often during difficult periods of my life, I take a camera and just start taking pictures of everything that interests me. For me, taking pictures is a kind of meditation: you turn off your brain, thoughts, and everything works on some subconscious level. My tools are my eyes and my camera. Everything you need to capture the moment, stop time (as I often call it).

The ability to see is the most important thing that my love of photography has taught me. What you see with your eyes is a kind of real image, like a photograph, which can create some thoughts in a person's head. The thoughts themselves provoke us to certain personal emotions (joy, sadness, inspiration, love, and so on), and then the emotions turn into words to convey and describe what you feel, what you are experiencing and what I am trying to do in this essay now.

The Stepantsminda’s series is a shot on black-and-white and color film. Why? I was interested in how the same place and similar objects (people, animals, cars, mountains, and so on) would be perceived visually on black-and-white and color films. It's like two sides of the same coin. The object is the same, but the sensations are different.

And you know, this kind of small experiment gave me a chance to reflect on the fact that this is also the case in our lives. We see, feel, perceive, the same things all in different ways. This means that the concept of meaning (happiness, love, pain, sadness) in life is individual for everyone. For some, happiness is riding a horse in the vicinity of Stepantsminda , for someone - serving God, for someone playing hide and seek with his friend in a ruined building, and for someone - the mountains surrounding him all his life.

As for the mountains themselves, the mountains rule in this area - they are the main ones here. As I noticed later they appear in every photo that I have taken as if it is impossible to hide from them. Their sizes, grandeur and energy are so large, unshakable, and intangible that you understand how small and insignificant we are in comparison with them. Our human ego sometimes soars so high that we often think that we are the navel of the earth, that our problems, desires and emotions are unique and require exceptional attention from the outside. But if you think about it, it is not. If we are so small in size and greatness compared to mountains, then imagine how small the mountains are compared to our Earth. And the Earth is compared to our star, and the sun is compared to our galaxy, and the galaxy is compared to the infinite universe. Realising this, I understand how insignificant and absurd sometimes our problems and our life itself are compared to the entire universe. Which leads me to believe that everything in our life is meaningless from an objective, absolute point of view.

This once again helped me to make sure that there is no need to look for meaning in life - there is none. Absolute, correct and objective for every person on planet Earth. But despite this bitter truth that was revealed to me in Stepantsminda , I realised that we should not look for meaning, but create it for ourselves. For me, this is doing what I love - photographing and painting, and the ability to see happiness in small things.

After all, we are just humans - stardust, searching for our souls, striving to find ourselves in this strange and unusual world.

Peace and Love,

Ika