Alone

I wait for my wife in a late night hospital hallway. Fuji X10 7mm f/2 1/30 ISO 125

My wife and I have recently gone through a difficult time as she experienced some serious health problems.  At one point I was struggling with questions of what it would mean to have my life change in radical and significant ways and the questions didn’t have easy answers.  I found myself spending a lot of time in hospitals and one night, late at night, I was waiting for my wife to come out of surgery and I realized that I was all alone in a long bare hallway.  I understand that there is something self-indulgent about self-portraits but I realized that I had an image here that expressed the things that I was feeling.  The worry, the uncertainty, the stomach churning anxiety as you wonder and helplessly watch this person you love the most suffer and struggle for breath.

To get the image I put my camera down on the floor in the centre of the hallway and set the self-timer.  Setting the camera on the floor had the effect of strengthening the perspective and it put the vanishing point right in the centre of the frame.  There is a sense of movement down the hallway, movement that is pulling me along without my ability to exert any control or influence.  It was that sense of helplessness that I was feeling and wanted to express in this image.  The X10 has a fast f/2 lens so even in the dim hallway I was able to get a decent image.

-Russell Berg