Suffering and Serendipity

I left my hotel in Bodrum, Turkey, in the early hours of the morning on the 12th of July, 2019. I couldn't sleep, so I got dressed and stepped out into the dark city. I wandered the empty streets in the quiet zone between the bars closing and early morning shops opening. I walked through the back streets and trekked up the hillside to the ruins carved into the rock. My experience has often been that a peaceful mind is easier to find in a deserted place that is usually full of people.

As the hours passed, the sky began to transition from black to dark orange. It was the final night of my stay in Turkey, so I resolved to find the perfect place to capture the Turkish sunrise. I descended from the hills, through the town and across the vast public square, until I found the position that I knew was just right.

At 18 minutes past 4 in the morning, I stood on the southern docks of Bodrum and watched as the glowing sphere of the sun rose slowly over the mountains. Turkey is warm even at night, but the soft heat of the sunrise washed gently over me. After this wonderful experience, the fatigue of my peaceful nocturnal excursion caught up to me and I began the walk home through the city as it began to stir. I arrived back at the hotel in time for breakfast, which I packed into a plastic bag and took back to my room, where I promptly fell asleep.

Below, you can see my progress through my little adventure and the process of finding a location and taking many, many photos throughout the sunrise before choosing the perfect one. When the sun was still mostly hidden behind the mountains it was stunning, but the sight of the full disc towering over the peaks blew them out of the water for me and thus why I chose that photo.

I chose to use no effects or alterations in this image.. I felt that the raw power of the Turkish sunrise didn't require photo-shopping. I come from a music photography background and have been thoroughly scarred from the experience of the laborious and mind-numbing task of editing pictures. I often spent endless hours tweaking all the photos from a concert. These experiences have left me with an affinity for the less-is-more approach, because I have found that the highest quality subjects in a picture often speak for themselves. I feel this is especially true for mobile phone pictures because of the technical limitations of the hardware. You can't take a 4k photo with a phone with perfect focus, clarity and fidelity of image. The beauty of the mobile phone camera is that you can capture your experiences in the rawest form possible, right there in the moment. They are meant to make memories and the best memories should not be artificially distorted.

Mere weeks after this picture was taken, I suffered a devastating health diagnosis that crippled me for months. It was indescribable pain and despair I had never imagined possible. I was unable to leave the house for months and had to take on a variety of new medications. I lost my job and became terribly isolated. Any positive memory of my holiday in Turkey was overwhelmed and forgotten because I had no choice but to give all my energy to battling my illness.

I rarely look back at old photos, but when I discovered this Vocal competition, I began to sift through my phone's memory. Reflecting on this picture of the sunrise on the docks in Turkey, during a period that I associate so vividly with the run up to my diagnosis, I remembered an experience I had forgotten during the course of my illness.

In times of great suffering, it is easy to lose faith in our convictions. I am a great believer in the concept of serendipity. These chance occurrences give me confidence that I am walking the right path.

Along the dockside, there were long piers to which nearly 500 small sea-crafts were moored. As I walked past the throngs of boats, I noticed a yacht that was moored in a space closest to the shore. The name of that yacht was Serendipity. Rediscovering this picture allowed me to remember and take comfort in the knowledge that, despite my illness and suffering, I was then and am now precisely where I am meant to be.