Photography is also poetry

Many years back I read somewhere, perhaps in Reader's Digest, that there are only three categories of people who are truly happy. To one category belongs a baby. The second one is of a poet. And the third one: a fool. A baby is happy and you can see a baby radiating happiness in body languages when he/she explores a new thing or when, for an instance, he/she gazes with wonder at a butterfly hovering over a flower. A baby unfortunately loses those exploratory feelings of ecstasy as he/she grows. A poet is happy as he pours his heart and soul to bring into being his innermost feelings. A poet doesn't age. To a poet the butterfly he first saw as a child does never pale; rather a poet discovers newer beauties of the same butterfly at different stages of his maturity. How otherwise could Rabindranath Tagore compose 'Shesher Kobita', such a romantic novel at his mid sixties when a man is supposed to find his aesthetic senses on the wane? A fool is happy too. A fool meditates on a flower like a baby; he marvels at the wonders of life like a poet and perhaps like a mad man he also laughs at people's chase after fortunes. Those of us who claim to be intelligent, pity the fools. But, what a pity! We are so unfortunately unaware of the exquisite pleasures a fool enjoys in his own paradise! Happiness naturally alights upon the babies, the poets and the fools and the rest of us only chase the mirage of happiness.
Where are we then? Aren't those of us who are no more babies happy? Is not the carpenter who doesn't have time to appreciate the beauties in nature happy? Can't a cardiac surgeon, who has spent his whole life at the service of ailing humanity, be happy? Why shouldn't an old man, who is spending most of his spare time praying and soliciting His blessings, find himself happy?
The answer lies in our self-ignorance. We are ignorant of the art of being crazily happy. To be truly happy, we have to emulate the babies, the poets, or the fools. We need to feel and behave like a fool, like a madman feels, while sucking the nectar of happiness from the flowers of life. And this is exactly how the creative people throughout history found happiness in their creations.
Rabindranath Tagore once said: "paagol ebong protivar modhdhey Proved Oti Samannya" (The margin between a madman and a genius is razor-thin). Aristotle is also attributed to have said: "No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness".
That creative people are a little crazy is well-known. My realization about the truth of creative craziness has been more reinforced after I met an electrical engineer named A. S. M. Masudur Rahman, more known as Ripon, at Plano, Texas, USA. He is a brilliant engineer with high academic achievements in Bangladesh and USA.
Ripon is a very pious Muslim. He never skipped a prayer. He works as a Senior System Validation Engineer in the Dallas office of NVDIA Corporation, a Video Card manufacturer based at Silicon Valley in California. His job is with the chips that are integral to wireless phones. He is happily married with Wasima, also an electrical engineer who is specialized in electronic circuit designing.
Ripon has taken photography as his hobby. No big deal. I am also a photographer since my childhood. I thought he was one of those who take common and unexceptional photographs like those of garden variety. Oh no! He is not an amateurish photographer. I was amazed when I came to learn how passionately he has taken photography as his parallel career. In his mansion-like home on Shepard Drive at Plano one specious room in the upstairs is reserved exclusively for his photography studies and researches. The room should be called a full-fledged studio.
What are the essential gadgets related to photography that are not there in his personal studio? A variety of cameras, a plethora of lenses, an array of lights and shades, umbrella-like reflectors to diffuse or accentuate lights, image printers for ready printing on photographic papers and many other photography paraphernalia have adorned his studio which looks more like a laboratory than a studio.
Ripon, an affable personality, has taken me to different interesting places in and around Dallas. He took my photographs with his highly professional cameras. I was amazed at seeing myself in the photographs. In the photographs, I looked so much like me, with no distortion of my face unlike in those snapshots of myself that I took with my own tiny pocket camera.
I read and heard about professional photography. I marveled at many world-famous photographs taken by towering figures like the Italian photographer Luigi Bussolati and the young photographer Ciril Jazbec from Slovenia. Who can forget those spine-chilling images of the atrocities during the liberation of Bangladesh snapped by Rashid Talukder, the great Bangladeshi photojournalist?  Who will not venerate the woman photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White who created the last portrait of Gandhi hours before his assassination?
I had an idea that a photographer has to be lucky to be famous. But from Ripon I could learn hands-on experience how real photography works. For an amateur, it is convenient to take snaps on Auto Mode where the camera takes the burden to assess light, determine the depth-of-field and the right focus. But for professional photographer it takes a lot to assess the light, angles, and many other conditions that put the subject in its proper perspective.
A creative photographer has to think outside the box to catch a vivid tapestry; he has to determine which software is suitable to equip his camera with before catching a minuscule object like a bunch of ants carrying their foods. Creativity is no more a premise you can culture on your own. Creativity is now an academic discipline. Critical thinking based on your experiences has long been regarded as the essential skill for success, but it's not enough. Creativity moves beyond mere synthesis and evaluation and is the higher order skill that is nowadays taught in the classrooms of universities. To be a good photographer, you have to study a lot, undergo trainings and snap thousands of pictures before you dare to claim yourself a professional photographer.
It is from Ripon that I have come to know that photography is poetry. You are enchanted by a panorama and if you are a poet you can reflexively register in your memory shelf a vivid picture of what you have seen and then express your feelings and impressions in a piece of poem on a piece of paper. Unless you have a poetic soul, Ripon says, your mind will not drive you to catch an object that can be beautified by photography. Being a good photographer is not easy, let alone getting to that of a professional level.
Where will you not find poetry? Scientists, if only they had some spare time outside their laboratories, I guess, could be great poets or great musicians or maybe professional photographers. Pythagoras, the father of Mathematics and Geometry, said: "There is geometry in the humming of the strings; there is music in the spacing of the spheres."
Well, Ripon is an electrical engineer and photography is a good discipline for him to pursue. He is crazy to spend a fortune in pursuit of photography. One may call him crazy. But he is happy. He is happy because he still nurtures the baby mind of marveling at nature with his lens ready to arrest a panorama or a moving object. One may call him fool. But he will not mind if he is deemed crazy for photography.
What, then, about those of us who are not photographers? What about you and I who are neither mad nor genius, neither a baby nor a fool? What about the majority of the people who couldn't be poets or scientists? What about all of us who are beset by sorrows and misfortunes, who don't have the means, like a poet has, to ventilate our pains and savour our pleasures?  But, unknowingly, to our comfort, we the unfortunate ones know how to solace our sorrows. We have the faculty to observe and think--no matter whether we can express those thoughts into words or pictures.
At the balcony of each of our hearts sits a poet as great as Rabindranath Tagore or maybe a greater poet, though we are illiterate. The only difference between Rabindranath Tagore and us is Tagore was a talkative observer and we on the other hand are very silent and meditative onlookers. Each of us is a living tome containing a cornucopia of experiences that could not be translated into printed words. Many of us have seen and felt much more than many great authors could afford to see or feel. And with our passing away from this world our unwritten tomes--unknown, unsung and unpublished---silently sink into oblivion.
We are all genius intrinsically; but the pity is we couldn't find a whetstone to hone our talents. Nor could we find someone like Tagore to hear our stories. We are like raw diamonds, rough and uncut, hidden underneath the soil of an unknown territory and they--Tagore and others--are brightly visible above the soil. They are like sparkling diamonds, well-cut and finely polished.
[email protected]