On Cameras and Seeing

The second most popular question I’ve been getting, after “how are you doing?” and the like, is some iteration of, “Do you have any photos?”  The answer is no, as I said in my previous post.  When I have photos, it’s because someone else has taken the photos and sends them to me, or links me to them on Facebook, or something like that.  I don’t have a camera.  The evolution of camera-carrying through my life is something like this:

1)     I didn’t have a camera because my parents did.

2)     I didn’t have a camera because I didn’t think of it.

3)     I had a camera and took many worthless photos with it.

4)    I had a camera and took only a few photos with it, still mostly worthless.

5)     I carried a camera, took no photos, felt guilty about it, and also worried it would get broken or stolen.

6)    I stopped carrying a camera.

I was going to write more about this topic, until I saw this , which said most of what I had to say, and in addition was funny (and a little cruel) about it.  The shorter version goes something like this: while I believe a camera helps some people to see, for me, in the vast majority of cases, it has the opposite effect.

I’ll speak about the exceptions first.  At Provincetown, I went out shooting with a visual artist fellow.  His name is Adam Davies, and he shoots with an eight-by-ten box camera on a tripod, with the lens maybe eight or nine feet off the ground.  When I’m with him, and his camera, I see far more, and better, than just about any other time.  I suspect this is more about him than about the camera.  There are other people who have a similar effect on me, and it’s one of the things I love to discover in a friendship.

But alone, or with most people, I find that rather than forcing me to look right now, a camera lets me put off the moment when I will actually look; and with the advent of digital cameras, where there’s not even the cost of developing the film to induce restraint, that moment is essentially put off forever.  Perhaps there’s some theoretical point in the future where I would have, had I taken them, gone over all my thousands of photos, but my challenge is not in planning for some theoretical future moment, but in being present right now.

A friend in Bulgaria said something to the effect that when she uses a camera, it’s the camera doing the looking, not her.  That’s a pretty succinct description of the situation as I experience it.

For me, having a camera is all too similar to those terrible moments when I’m dancing, for example, and all the sudden become conscious of the fact that I’m dancing, and that people can see me dancing.  Between me and the act (looking, dancing), something has intruded (camera, consciousness), and anything natural about the act, any kind of rhythm or flow, is destroyed.

Ultimately, I’m not terribly convinced of the value of looking back over photos to remember things I’ve seen.  Photos, except for those taken by good photographers, never capture what makes a moment or a memory worth noting in the first place, and nostalgia is a feeling that I am not comfortable with, though like anyone, I succumb to it.  So in the end, I sacrifice the very valid benefit of a photo—sharing it with other people—because I don’t feel it’s worth the trade-off.

All that said, I have occasionally taken some notes about things I’ve seen and experienced on this trip, and will occasionally post an edited version of those notes, so that anyone who does want to get an idea about where I am can read them and, if I’m doing my job, understand at least a little bit.  Please note that I reserve the right to use any of these descriptions in my future writing, whether it be fiction, non-fiction, verse, drama, or some as yet undiscovered form.