Art In Many Forms

Photography by Wolfgang Suschitzky

Wolfgang Suschitzky (29 August 1912 – 7 October 2016), was an Austrian-born British documentary photographer, as well as a cinematographer perhaps best known for his collaboration with Paul Rotha in the 1940s and his work on Mike Hodges' 1971 film Get Carter.

Most people wait for proof before they commit. They want the sunrise to hit their face before they believe the night is over. But true resilience functions in the opposite direction. It starts with an internal certainty that precedes the external reality.

Rabindranath Tagore captured this perfectly: Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.

Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Beyond his poetry, he was a polymath who resigned his British knighthood in 1919 to protest colonial injustice. He lived through times of profound political and social darkness, yet his philosophy remained anchored in the idea that human intuition can perceive hope long before the physical world catches up.

Consider these shifts in perspective:

- Certainty is an internal choice, not a reaction to your environment.
- The most significant breakthroughs usually happen during periods of high ambiguity.
- Waiting for a visible sign is often just a sophisticated form of procrastination.

What are you waiting to see before you finally decide to trust your own direction?

Ivan Aivazovski, The Wrath Of The Seas

Suffering is only unbearable when it feels useless. The moment you attach a reason to your struggle, your capacity to endure it becomes almost limitless.

I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.

These are the words of Haruki Murakami, a writer who famously transformed his life at age 29 after a sudden epiphany at a baseball game. To sustain his demanding writing schedule, Murakami took up long-distance running, eventually completing over 30 marathons and several ultramarathons. He often argues that the physical pain of the race is what grounds his creativity and provides the discipline necessary for his craft.

When we find ourselves in a difficult season, our first instinct is often to seek an escape. However, Murakami suggests a different approach: find the utility in the friction. Pain becomes a tool for development once you identify the value it produces. Whether it is the exhaustion of a new project or the emotional weight of a transition, meaning acts as the anchor that keeps you steady through the storm.

What is the purpose behind the hard work you are doing right now?

Cloud Storage
Nobody keeps things in drawers anymore.
The biscuit tin beneath the bed
that held old photographs,
the elastic-bound bundle of letters,
the parish newsletter yellowed at the fold,
the funeral card tucked
inside a missal for twenty years—
all of it has drifted upward.

Now memory lives somewhere else.
In a place nobody can point to.
No field. No townland.
No room above the shop.
No attic smelling of dust
and old wallpaper.

Only a word:
Cloud.
As if our lives had become weather.

The top shelf held envelopes
fat with black-and-white faces,
men standing stiff beside bicycles,
women in coats too heavy for spring,
children squinting into sunlight
that disappeared before I was born.

You could touch those years.
You could feel their weight.
The paper curled at the corners.
The photographs carried
the smell of damp and turf smoke.

Now a thousand images
sleep inside a telephone.
Birthdays.
Holidays.
Meals nobody remembers eating.
Sunsets photographed twice
because the first one wasn't perfect.

A thumb moves.
A face appears.
Another thumb moves.
The face is gone again.

There is something miraculous in it.

And something lonely.

I wonder what future generations
will find when they go looking.
Will they open a cardboard box
in the back of a wardrobe?

Will they discover a letter
creased from being read too often?

Or will they inherit passwords,
usernames,
forgotten email addresses,
and photographs floating invisibly
through distant servers
on the far side of the world?

Perhaps memory has always been fragile.

A letter can burn.
A photograph can fade.
A hard drive can fail.

Loss changes its clothes
but remains the same old visitor.

Still,
on wet evenings
I sometimes open a drawer
and find my father's handwriting
on the back of an envelope.
The ink has softened.
The paper has yellowed.
Yet there it is.
Solid as stone.

While somewhere above us,
beyond the rain clouds
millions of digital memories drift unseen,
waiting for a password
that somebody, someday,
will forget.