On Coincidences

Photographer unknown. “Walter Miller Shooting from Woolworth Building”. New York, 1912-13

 

The other night, at dinner in a restaurant, talking about dogs with a dear friend of mine, he told me how he discovered Erik Satie thanks to a coincidence: many years ago he met a friend of his who had a dog, he asked the name of the dog and she replied “Satie”, then my friend was amazed at the strange name and she replied that he was a famous composer. From that moment Satie became one of his favorite musicians – and mine, since my friend lives above my room, he is older than me and was the one who initiated me into music and books.

The life of each of us is full of these, which we call coincidences. Small or large.

If I hadn't chosen to follow Songa, the first time I visited her school in Jakarta's Plumpang slum, I would never have seen her crumbling wooden house and I would never have been able to force the governor of the city to renovate it with a solid brick house.

The same, it was a coincidence the time I was a guest of the USM University in Penang, in my month in Malaysia, that there was precisely the ceremony of the publishing house in front of the Rector and all the general state of the university deans: they gave me 15 minutes to talk about the literary power of photography and the following year I lived and worked for two years in that same university.

 

It could go on and on and each of us can make our own list.

I honestly never believed in coincidences.

Too often we make coincidence and chance coincide, but they are not the same thing, so much so that we have to add – often – the coincidence of the case.

Etymologically coincidence is a co - incidence, that is an event together, an event at the same instant, but no reference is made to chance; indeed, trains or other means of transport that await the arrival of others to take us to another place are called coincidences.

There is more exactness than randomness in this term.

 

More than the fortuitous meeting of two events, I always like to quote a Chinese proverb which, more or less, says that coincidences are like islands in the sea: separate on the surface but one at the bottom of the ocean.

As always, there is all the Chinese wisdom in these few words, but it does well that sense of deep connection that is difficult to see on the surface of things.

This proverb has always inspired me and I completely agree with it.

 

I do not read any higher divine plan, but more an earthly law that regulates our existences, which loves to disguise its plots as the famous Veil of Maya. This leads us to call what is coincidence randomness. It makes us confuse the terms.

 

Thinking about Photography, I think the same is true.

Street photographs, or portraits taken of people met by chance, always seem like coincidences.

But as a famous photographer said: it's not the photographer who looks for the photo but the photo that finds the photographer.

Or Ansel Adams, more mystically: “Sometimes I get to certain places just when God has made them ready for someone to take a picture.”

Perhaps with that “magical thought” that often characterizes me, I think that certain photographs are beautiful coincidences – indeed, they are always coincidences.

They are the coexistence of two events, the exact meeting of two trains going in opposite directions.

Then let's add the randomness, luck, and all the ingredients that make the recipe more delicious, but in the end, there remains that moment that seems to have been there before it happened, and of which we only become witnesses with our lens and the index of the hand.

 

Once again, Photography tells us about our lives.

And it does in its own light way.

Of all those islands that we love to collect, as separate moments in time but which are a single plot at the bottom of our oceans.

Italian version