When Fear Doesn't Stop You.
Last year I abseiled the Spinnaker Tower. It's an observation tower in Portsmouth, Hampshire. The kind of thing you look at from a distance and think, yes, that's impressive, and then don't think about again because it isn't relevant to your daily life. Unless someone asks you to go over the side of it on a rope. The wind was high enough that the staff were considering closing the ropes for the day. Then the ropes got knotted on a bolt on a different side of the building and I had to go and free myself.
I wasn't scared. Not at any point. Not remotely. The staff member working the rope looked at me before I went over and said something I've been thinking about ever since. "You have no fear in your eyes." Not quite a compliment and not quite concern. More like an observation she wasn't sure what to do with.
The Dark
I am scared of the dark. It's a common fear and I will always put my hands up to having it. Not exactly the dark itself. More precisely, I'm scared of what the dark contains that I can't see. It's the uncertainty. The not-knowing what's there and being unable to confirm it either way. I'm aware this sounds slightly absurd coming from someone who regularly sets an alarm for four in the morning and drives to fields before sunrise. But morning darkness and evening darkness are not the same thing. Morning darkness has a direction to it. Sunrise is coming and the darkness is temporary in a way you can feel rather than just understand intellectually. I'm completely comfortable at four-thirty in a field because the light is already on its way. Evening darkness is different. The direction is wrong. The light is leaving rather than arriving. I avoid it whenever I reasonably can. I do not enjoy being outside after dark. I do it occasionally when the work demands it. And I have entirely stopped pretending I might.
People
My fear of people is harder to admit than the dark. I have never particularly enjoyed social interactions. I don't dislike people, that's something different. But the interactions themselves, particularly with people I don't know well, carry a low-level anxiety that has been present for as long as I can remember. Early in my career this cost me time I didn't have. Arriving at a shoot already managing anxiety about the people before I'd even set up the equipment. What changed it, slowly and through no particular intention on my part, was the work itself. The more people I photographed, the more patterns I started to recognise. The way nervous subjects carry their nerves. The moment the performance drops and something more real emerges. I got better at reading those signals because I was seeing them constantly, and the better I got at reading them, the less uncertain the interaction felt. The uncertainty was what was frightening, not the people. Photography turned out to be an extremely effective form of exposure therapy that I hadn't signed up for. The anxiety hasn't disappeared. But it's workable in a way it wasn't before, because I've sat with it enough times to know it doesn't mean anything is wrong. It just means I'm paying attention.
Animals
Animals don't frighten me as a general rule. I work on a principle that has served me well; as long as something doesn't touch me unexpectedly, I'm happy to photograph almost anything. I do have a slight fear of bats. It developed from being in a hut next to Kielder Water in Northumberland. Low light. No warnings. I discovered, at close range, that a bat had been in the room with me the whole time and was hanging at approximately face height directly next to where I'd been standing. The fear was immediate and entirely disproportionate. But when I thought about it afterward, the fear wasn't of the bat. The bat was simply existing, doing bat things, entirely unbothered by me. The fear was of not having known it was there. The shock of discovering something sharing your space that you hadn't registered. Which is, when you trace it back, exactly the same thing as the dark. It isn't the thing. It's the not-knowing the thing is there.
What Fear Actually Is
Fear is the nervous system saying pay attention, this matters. That's it. That's all it is. It isn't a stop sign. It isn't evidence that something is wrong. It's information, a signal that something requires your focus. The problem isn't the signal. The problem is when you treat the signal as a verdict rather than a prompt.
Photography taught me this more concretely than anything else. Because photography is, structurally, a very good way of confronting things that make you uncomfortable. You have a reason to be there. Something to do that keeps your attention. A frame to look through, which creates a useful distance. And afterward, the images, which reframe the experience as something that happened, was survived, and produced something tangible. I've used a camera to get closer to things I was uncertain about since before I understood that's what I was doing. The insect I didn't want to touch but photographed at close range. The social interaction I managed because I had a professional role to inhabit. The dark field at five in the morning where the light was arriving and I had work to do.
The Spinnaker Answer
When I think about what the staff member saw, or didn't see, when she looked at me before I went over the edge, I think I understand it now. It wasn't that I have no fear. I have a perfectly functional list. It was that I'd assessed the situation clearly, decided the uncertainty was manageable, and committed. The part of the brain that generates fear had looked at a hundred-metre drop in high wind and concluded, accurately, that the risk was controlled and the outcome was survivable. So it didn't fire. What fires it is the stuff you can't assess in advance. The dark where you don't know what's there. The person you can't read yet. The room where something was present that you didn't know about.
Fear, for me, lives in the gap between what I can see and what I can't. And photography, almost accidentally, has spent years narrowing that gap. Bringing things into focus. Making the uncertain known. Replacing the not-knowing with an image. I don't think that's a coincidence. I think it might be the whole point.
Listen to Episode Twelve: When Fear Doesn’t Stop You →
The full story, told properly. Including the parts that don't make me look good.
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