‘Let it Happen’ is a song by Tame Impala that you probably only like when you’re drunk. It must have been sung by a man who made a Faustian deal with the devil – or possibly some Hungarian club promoters –  because it played at least four times in any club I was in during my stint in Budapest with Dublin University Photography Association (DUPA) during Reading Week. As I listened, what exactly the singer was going to ‘let happen’ felt increasingly unclear. Since starting college, I have attempted to persuade myself to ‘let it happen’ – to persuade myself that I could be a spontaneous person, ‘letting it happen’, and therefore living a more adventurous life. 

Taking photographs – the thing all of us were on the trip to do – is the exact opposite of ‘letting it happen’. When you take a photograph you are not an active participant in the passing of time; you are holding onto a moment, and choosing how to frame it counts.

We spent the second last night in Budapest in a club called ‘Instant’. The sallow-skinned barmen glided around drunk tourists carrying mysterious barrels, and the cheapest shots looked like strawberry yoghurt, so everyone’s breath smelt faintly like Yoplait. This description might give you an indication of  my own particular ideas about what makes a good night or a bad club, or at least, of my  particular aversion to yoghurt. Here, I am positioning myself as a passive observer, when really, on this trip, I  was constantly making moral judgements about what I saw. I could write all this to give you these impressions, or I could show you a photograph, or series of photographs, and you would understand how I felt about the place and the people in it without me having to give anything too personal away. Then, I could show you something that completely contradicts this image once again, a photo framing everyone as swept up in the sweaty beauty of collective intoxication. That’s what makes photography so seductive – there has never been a better way to honestly lie. 

John Berger, in his seminal essay collection Ways of Seeing, wrote that “every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of possible sights”

Photography can be the most delicious form of narcissism, in that it always seems to justify its own ends. If the aim of the photographer appears as some authentic representation of reality, the will of the subject can be disregarded altogether, in service to a higher goal. All photographers don’t necessarily suffer from an unreasonably high sense of their importance, but it’s rare to find someone who is as comfortable in front of the camera as behind it. Maybe this is some subconscious admittance that there is something the photographer is trying to take away from the photographed.

Susan Sontag wrote about this in On Photography: “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relationship with the world that feels like knowledge – and therefore power”* I maintain a very murky understanding of Budapest and yet a clarifying feeling passed through me as I looked at its sites through the viewfinder of my Dad’s old film camera, a canon AE-1 that hung reliably around my neck. It was as if, once those precious and sparingly-used 36 shots were developed and returned to me, I would finally be able to reach some sort of conclusion about the trip. Looking at the photos, I would finally understand what I had seen without needing to archive it afterwards.

This is why I find it so easy to justify constant photography – when a moment begs to be captured, held and remembered, who are we if we just sit by, letting it happen?

I came to Budapest with a single roll of film in my camera, which came out completely blank. I have no photographic record of the trip, beyond a handful of blurred bathroom selfies and a single photo of a roller grill with the meat from the kebab I got the first night. I ended the trip with no more in my archive than a handful of drunken, anxious journal entries wondering if I should be enjoying myself more. While on the trip, I tried to go along with the idea of letting things happen to me, but I always had a camera on hand, or was itching for a private moment to scribble out how the people in my company appeared to me, how Budapest felt. I wanted to write how I was enjoying the sights of cathedrals, but they felt so remote to me – a lot of it failed to move me. I dramatically diagnosed this as a symptom of some permanent apathetic perception of the world, like a persistently smudged pair of sunglasses. Actually, I only fell back into the familiar habit of delighting in my surroundings when I arrived home in Dublin, the ability to take interest in the shapes of cobblestones returning as swiftly as it fell away. 

One particular episode on my first evening in Budapest retains the timid integrity of the photograph I never took of it. We walked to the Fisherman’s bastion for scheduled ‘golden hour’ photography. The sun was low, so every stone was glazed in egg wash. Couples took turns perching between the squared walls of the viewpoint over the city, the bell started tolling. Already the clear lines between people within the society, those close groups of friends and floundering hangers-on were making themselves known. The sky was the epitome of sky; the mullioned windows were covered in mullions – whatever they are; a man played violin in the far corner of the bastion seemingly in competition with the bells for the attention of tourists. It was a moment of undeniable poetry, which everyone acknowledged in their own small way before the sky darkened and everyone incrementally filed down the stairs . As I was leaving, I indiscriminately tossed a few euros and florins to him and began to hurry towards the others, when I turned back around and walked up to him asking: ‘Can I take a photo of you?’. He stopped playing for a moment, squinting at me, then nodded at a ten euro note sellotaped to his case. ‘I already gave you some money,’ I explained, pointing at the coins I left at his feet. Again, he gestured at the laminated sign beneath the note, which said helpfully, ‘€10 for photo’. I scrambled for something else to say, making vague mental calculations that the amount I had given him calculated to more than a tenner, and would probably mean one less meal than what I budgeted for and simultaneously made desperate invisible camera pose gestures. He made a grieved noise and waved me away, lifting his bow to start playing again, and I quickly hurried away to rejoin the rest of the group.The cameras of the other tourists trickling out of the bastion slackened in the lightness of the photos they had not yet taken that day.