Packing for a trip is always a delicate balancing act between too much and too little. But even prior to all those weighty decisions for me – is the decision about whether or not to take a camera.
For most people, a camera is a foregone conclusion when they travel. But I come to that crossroads with the extra poundage of my parents’ prejudices in my backpack. My mother especially was given to issuing carefree, Auntie Mame waivers – about living in the moment. “Don’t record life. Live it! Don’t take pictures to look back on. Look at what’s around you now!” For her, taking pictures was like taking copious notes in class. You miss so much while you’re scribbling. You miss the fleeting grimace on the teacher’s face. You miss his joy in making a point. You miss the nuance in favor of the facts.
That all sounded so Bohemian and right. And other people’s pictures generally supported her argument. If anyone ever had the time to look back through them at all, they would generally find posed shots of “Say cheese” groups standing in front of – the Taj Mahal - the Eiffel Tower - the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And there were so many indiscriminate shots of these clumps of conscripted smilers.
Now technology has made it possible to be even more indiscriminate. Weddings aren’t usually about creating close, personal family ties anymore. They aren’t about the intimate hopefulness in the vows made between two people in love. Weddings are now usually mass staged events, like coronation ceremonies. The point is in the spectacle of the thing. The point is all in how the thing is visually arranged for the ubiquitous cameras. And a bride feels her life is ruined if the photographer somehow fails to get a shot of her throwing the bouquet.
In earlier decades, people usually only captured one or two choice pictures of themselves around the time of their weddings. My mother had one formal picture made in 1928. It is a sepia close-up of her husband-to-be smiling down wistfully, indulgently at her - and her looking up at him, a little tentatively, perhaps just a shade unconvinced that she wanted to launch on this adventure. She might have been prescient because that marriage did end in divorce about six years later. It ended amiably enough, amid, what was for the times, a relatively mild scuffle of Depression-era troubles. Yet at the moment the photographer snapped the picture, they were a strikingly handsome jazz-age couple - an early, untroubled F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda - except for just that slight shadow of doubt that might have revealed itself to someone pondering the picture closely enough. The photographer kept them on display in his window for years – a close-up example of his skill.
That picture is all my mother had or cared to have of the rites surrounding her first marriage. Then she didn’t even think to have any pictures at all taken when she married my father twenty years later in a civil ceremony. She was content to let all the unphotographed moments shed their skin and assume newer, livelier forms in the minds of the people who were there. Presumably she lived in the moment, and that was enough.
Now it seems necessary that everything about a wedding be captured on film. Now we must record every one of Uncle Johnny’s jarring elbow thrusts as he attempts to do the Macarena at the wedding reception. Now we must record Cousin Otis precariously threading his way across the dance floor, holding a sloppy, sliding piece of wedding cake on his little paper plate. These details can be of telling interest. But somehow, they usually end up being neither telling nor interesting. They just trap Cousin Otis in a podgy limbo somewhere between the self-conscious and the candid, whereas before he could have flown free into history. In the same way, our traveling companions of a previous era could have remained more truly themselves, rather than being cut to the constant Procrustean Bed of a picture frame.
Yes, my mother was right about all that. But then I got a digital camera. And I started taking pictures.
I still choose my shots carefully, although when I have the camera along, I feel pressure to take the obligatory shot of the landmark. But in general, I try to limit myself to things that have a personal, unpredictable interest.
And lo and behold! I see things on these pictures I would never have seen if I had just “lived in the moment.” For example, I recently took a series of photographs of the large Cooper’s Hawks that have miraculously been visiting my garden in a populous Chicago neighborhood. Looking over the pictures, I was amazed to find one that captured the instant when the hawk’s second eyelids, its nictitating membranes, were pulled down - eerie, iridescent shades over its eyes. Although the bird was indeed a hawk and not a raven, that captured slice reminded me of Poe’s final-stanza description of his harbinger bird – “And its eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming…”
That and a thousand other details are revealed in a photograph – details that would have been forever lost in the rush of impressions that constitute life in the moment. I suppose this value in taking pictures should have been obvious to me all along, if the enterprise hadn’t been clouded by my mother’s injunctions – and even more, by the generally rather dull and trivializing output of most shutterbugs.
But then, also perhaps obviously, I have discovered value not only in the picture, but in the process of taking pictures. Having a camera in my hand wakens me to my surroundings. I go forth with an artist’s eye, in the footsteps of Steichen and Stieglitz, more keenly aware - scouring the landscape for unique features, for odd juxtapositions that might be a commentary on the human condition, without necessarily involving any actual humans.
I still feel a reluctance to take pictures of people. That might in part be due to an instinct operating in me similar to the instinct operating among tribal peoples and people in closer-knit communities like the Amish. It’s a feeling that to take a picture of a person is to literally “capture” and encase the essence of that person in too-earthly a mold. And again going back to all the sorry and depreciatingly specific remembrances we have of the Uncle Johnnies of the world – that instinct has wisdom in it.
Then too, I feel that taking a picture of a person is just generally too intrusive an act. It seems it should certainly entail my approaching the person and asking their permission first. But if I do that, I will almost always destroy the spontaneity that made me want to take the picture in the first place. So how is that whole exchange supposed to be negotiated? I’m never sure. The classes I’ve taken in photography haven’t covered that topic. Any tips that teachers could give in this regard would probably have to boil down to legality and sensitivity – and after that, how to take pictures covertly.
I know I would certainly be made to feel ill at ease if I spotted someone photographing me, even if I was sure it wasn’t part of a lawyer’s investigation, but only because I was “picturesque.” Perhaps I’d be even more put-off by implications of picturesqueness, because that usually means being somehow typical of a place and time, being somehow representative. And above all, it usually means being old. And I assume other people feel the same aversion I do to being typecast that way.
But again, I might be wrong in many cases. On my recent trip to Sicily, I was rather taken aback to see a member of our tour group ask permission, then stand directly in front of a weathered native (an old-man-and-the-sea archetype) – ready to snap him head-on from only a foot away. I cringed at the audacity. But then something amazing! As our tour member lined up her shot, a huge grin radiated across the man’s face. Pride at being found picture-worthy boosted him, suddenly reversing the years’ inevitable sapping of youth and vigor. In the gaze of this media attention, he flowered into his prime, a second wind filling his sails. It was apparent our tour member had brought immense joy to someone by soliciting such bold exposure. And I felt a little ashamed of my global reticence. Because of it, I might have missed many opportunities to similarly bring joy to people.
Going back to the original dilemma that prompted all this reflection - I decided not to bring my camera along on the Sicily trip at all. It was practical reasons rather than philosophy that made the decision for me in the end. I had heard so much about drive-by camera-snatchings all over the world. And my camera had a big zoom lens. It couldn’t be tucked in a pocket. It would be an albatross around my neck, something that would brand me as a tourist from a mile away. Or more affectionately, it would be like traveling with an infant. I would have to be constantly conscious of it, protective of it – swaddling it away from harm.
I wasn’t even sure how to get such a thing on board an airplane in the first place. Not being much of a traveler, I didn’t know the post 9/11 protocol regarding cameras. You don’t really pack such an expensive, delicate item in your checked luggage, do you? But on the other hand, isn’t a camera a suspicious thing to carry dangling as you go through inspection? Wouldn’t the security guards want to disassemble it to make sure it wasn’t a bomb? Then even if I got it intact onto the plane, I’d be left with a big wattle weighing me for 3,000 miles across the Atlantic.
I am always so flummoxed by these little questions in life. While other people are grappling with wars and famine and family crises – I am left in the dust, immobilized by whether or not to tote a camera.
In the end I left the camera behind. In the end, I regretted it. Everyone else on the tour through Sicily routinely brought cameras along, seemingly without have spent a moment agonizing over what – how – who. So I will have to depend on the kindness of these strangers to share their pictures with me if I want to look back at where I’ve been.
But I probably won’t make a big point of asking to look back through their portfolios of pictures. I now see how my mother was partially wrong. But I still appreciate how she was partially right about the shallowness of taking pictures. A lot of things are better left to the imagination. Although I have developed a sort of keenness for taking the occasional photo, my primary medium always was, and probably will continue to be – the printed word. So I will still likely keep most of my memories of trips through life in the form of letters I write or in just random jottings like this.
Taking pictures is more like watching TV. Writing is more like listening to the radio. When I take pictures, I’m pretty much limited to capturing a scene as it is. Yes, I have choices – a choice of subject matter, of angle, of lighting, etc. But these are all choices among off-the-rack options already out there. Writing seems to leave me more room to insert myself into the scene. When I write up an experience, I can weave myself into the very fabric of the narrative.
So I will write my trip to Sicily. In some follow-up postings, I will tell what I saw in Sicily – or, more accurately, I will tell what a picture Sicily and I made together.
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