Lenses and Photography
6am. A train’s call, riding on the spring breeze, follows our winding stroll through the streets.
“Noor, tell me what you see,” implores my grandfather. He has been blind for years.
“It’s dark,” I tell him, “the stars are sparkling up there. I can see in the moonlight, just beyond the house, a weeping cherry tree with flowers gathering along its branches.”
He smiles. “Noor, what else?” he asks.
As a child, I’d walk with my grandfather each morning, telling him what I saw. I was the lens through which he saw the world. When I looked at his face, the folds and crinkles framed eyes that were blank. Sometimes I’d wonder what swimming in blackness would be like, smelling foreign scents, hearing strange sounds, and only remembering the faded ghosts of the faces I once knew. It wasn’t until I was older that I began to appreciate the depth of his reliance on me. I remember wanting to only tell him about the good parts of the world.
When I wasn’t describing the world through words, I was drawing. My hand swept across layers of pages, breathing life into a pumpkinseed sunfish in its habitat and the silhouette of a girl dancing with cranes at dawn. Illustration was the birthplace of my creation, a place where no imagined idea was too complex to be conveyed, or too insane to be considered. But my drawings only included the things I wanted people to see. Gradually, I came to appreciate the value of seeing the world in a more objective way, through photos.
As I grew older, I used photography to bring people’s attention to things that mattered to me: my family, watching the fireworks sizzling, or sunlight glinting off of bangled wrists on Eid. While initially my goal was simply to capture breathtaking photographs, I soon realized photography had another potential.
At 14, I saw Stephen Mccurry’s “Afghan Girl.” Sitting in the dust, with dirt caked across her face, her eyes glowed with a sense of fiery pride. When I learned people had volunteered at refugee camps because of her picture, it showed me that images like these could motivate people to make a change.
Slowly, my photography evolved. I captured a broken landscape scattered with ashes from a forest fire, and the feral look in the eyes of a wolf in Yellowstone as it scavenged in starvation year. But the methods I’d used so far–drawing and photography–had only a small reach. I realized there was a gap between what I saw and what I could do about it. Interestingly, science helped bridge that gap.
While researching the advancement of biofuels at the Rutgers Waksman Institute, I isolated duckweed proteins to identify if it contained proteins that matched those in a certain environment. If the plant cooperated with an environment, it could be phenotypically altered to produce an oil-resemblant fuel to serve as an enduring bio-energy source.
We published our findings, and, for the first time, I felt like what I was doing was beautiful beyond just displaying the world’s visual beauty.
I flash back to a faint memory. 9 am. The colors of the sun are cracking into the sky. I describe them to my grandfather, but I don’t paint the full picture–the fallen trees from a storm, or the deer lying dead on the side of the road. I wish now that I could have told myself that my responsibility was not just to bring out the visual beauty in the world. The world’s ugliness was not meant to be covered up, but to be exposed, and there was beauty in the change that could take place as a result of that. If I had a second chance to tell my grandfather what I saw, I would give him the full picture. And I know now that he would have loved to hear that too.