What Carried Me Here
In a few weeks, I'll be having the first of two hip replacements.
Oddly, the overwhelming feeling isn't fear.
It's relief.
Not because I'm looking forward to surgery, but because I've finally stopped looking only at what's ahead and started looking at what brought me here.
For most of my life, I never thought about my hips.
I thought about the next flight.
The next portrait.
Whether the light would still be there when I arrived.
I've always been curious.
Curious about people.
About light.
About Africa.
About children.
About flowers in my own garden.
About the way a silverback gorilla looks at its family.
About the way a mother looks at her newborn.
About the first light creeping through Delta Park before most people are awake.
My curiosity kept saying, "Let's go."
My body quietly replied, "Alright."
It carried overloaded Pelican cases through airports across Africa.
It loaded cars with more equipment than was sensible because one more light always seemed worth taking.
It lay on studio floors beside children.
It climbed the dunes of Sossusvlei before dawn.
It wandered through townships with a camera.
It stood a few metres from mountain gorillas.
It spent countless mornings in my garden, lying in the grass waiting for a flower to catch the light just so.
I thought about the photograph.
My body simply got on with its job.
For fifty-nine years it quietly said yes.
Yes, carry that.
Yes, kneel.
Yes, get back up.
Yes, tomorrow too.
Only recently have I realised those yeses were never guaranteed.
Pain has a way of making life smaller.
Without really noticing, I stopped walking Yoda.
Cycling was kinder.
It was the sensible choice.
But sensible choices sometimes come with quiet losses.
I missed the early mornings.
The changing seasons.
The first cold mornings of winter.
The smell of summer rain.
The simple rhythm of watching a stubborn little bulldog discover something fascinating every twenty metres.
The world became smaller.
My curiosity didn't.
Instead of wandering with a camera, I reached for my phone.
Instead of travelling across Africa, I wandered around my own garden looking for light on a petal.
I realised curiosity doesn't disappear.
Sometimes it simply learns to look closer.
One afternoon Bas quietly took my arm as we climbed the front steps.
I leaned on him more than I meant to.
I've thought about my mother in that moment.
She walked this road decades before I did, under circumstances far harder than mine.
At the time, I was too young to understand what that must have taken.
Now I do.
I've thought about my garden too.
I planted almost everything in it.
For years it was another room of my home.
Lately I've mostly stood and looked.
Jobs that once took an afternoon became half an hour, then ten minutes.
Sometimes I find myself looking across it and saying,
"Hang in there."
"I'll be back."
Perhaps that's what all of this has really given me.
Not perspective.
Gratitude.
Gratitude for a body that quietly carried me wherever my curiosity wanted to go.
Gratitude for my mother.
For Bas.
For Yoda, who never once complained about shorter walks.
For my clients, who have trusted me with their stories for more than twenty years.
When I look back now, I don't think first about the pain.
I think about the airports.
The overloaded car.
The studio floor.
Delta Park.
The gorillas.
The flowers in my garden.
The ordinary Tuesdays that never felt extraordinary at the time.
I've been remarkably fortunate.
And when the second hip has been replaced and all of this is behind me, I have a feeling those old joints deserve one last portrait.
One light.
Black background.
They've earned it.
JOHANNESBURG PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER
One Moment. One Portrait. Forever
© 2005–2026 Bridget Corke Photography
Blairgowrie · Johannesburg · South Africa
International Master's in Portrait Photography
One of only two in Africa.