#23: The Camera
It all feels a bit meta really, taking a photograph of a photograph-taking-machine.
This is a Brownie camera, which first appeared in 1900 and was invented as a low-cost camera for the general public, introducing the concept of the ‘snap-shot’ photograph. Now I don’t know much more about the history of photography, although I’m happy to do a bit of wikipedia research, and I have never used an old camera (unless you count disposables or polaroids as old now). However, I can appreciate the odd attractiveness of using an antique camera, the fashionable craze with ‘vintage’. And you’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty adorable and classy looking camera right there.
Cameras. Wonderful things. Even magical at the time of their conception. There is always the myth of trapping someone in a photograph. Do we take a little bit of that person’s personality and trap it in a small, hand-held photo? Or in the digital age, are we trapping them in the world of cyberspace? It makes me think of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children:
“there are no photographs of my grandmother anywhere on earth. She was not one to be trapped in anyone’s little black box.”
Photographs are a way of making copies of people and things, from that particular moment. My favourite photos are always the candid ones, the ones where no one has to worry what their smile looks like, if their hair is in the right place. In essence, the ‘snapshot’ photo the Brownie camera was made for. The people in the photo are lost in their moment, and the photographer has captured it. We can see their expression, the way the light catches their face, the direction their head is turned. Yet we cannot know what they are thinking, what they are looking at beyond the frame. They can though, and this photograph can remind them. I always savour the joy of coming across a photo of myself that I had forgotten existed, and being reminded of the memories behind it.
However, I have two main issues with photographs. The first, is that it never turns out how I am seeing it there and then. It captures only 1/10th of what I am seeing with my own eyes and mind, but it is never as touching or as glorious as it is in the moment. I can think of so many beautiful sunsets that I have witnessed, that I have attempted to capture, and failed to reach that true beauty. Just look at my Instagram, and you’ll see the attempts. Yet they can still make good photos. They still capture amazing blends of colour, shadow, and light. They just aren’t what I was seeing at that moment. They are the camera’s own interpretation, independent of whatever I wish it would do. I’m sure Eleanor has had the same issue with the beautiful views she has witnessed out of her skylight this year, or maybe it’s just me.
My second issue? If you are the photographer, you are not in the moment. You are too busy trying to photograph the moment to be in the moment. You find yourself looking at the screen on your phone or through the tiny viewing hole in the camera rather than at the people or things in front of you, at the reality of that moment that you are supposed to be a part of.
Yet after the moment, I will want a memento of the occasion. I can’t have it both ways, I have to sacrifice either the memory, or those few seconds it takes to take the photo. Sometimes those seconds are too precious.
This is why people have photographers at big events, like weddings. Recently, two couples on my facebook got married (I know, talk about scary, how old am I now?). They took two very different approaches when it came to photography. One couple gave their guests a hashtag, encouraging them to take photos and share them over social media. The other asked for no photos to be shared, at least until after the event — they wished to use the official ones first.
Two very different approaches, don’t you think? And I love both of them. I love the social media one because I can imagine the elated couple searching the hashtag on the day or afterwards, maybe later that evening, and looking at all these photos taking at their wedding, their special day, and they can feel more involved in all the groups of people that they had to join them and celebrate. They can find comic and serious, candid and posed. Yet the other, in asking for the limited sharing of photos, is equally beautiful. It challenges the guests to experience the moment as it is, to not be constantly thinking of sharing a photo right there and then. Instead they get to focus on the people right in front of them, not through the lens, not documenting and sharing every second.
I love both approaches. I love this sense of including everyone, of reaching toward the candid and the involved moment of the photo, and I also love the focus on the moment with those physically present. If only we could experience it twice, that would be the best of both worlds.
Or would it?
‘That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.” ~Emily Dickinson~
These moments are brief, fleeting, not to be repeated. We love them, we miss them, we want to replay them as we savour them. The moment may end, even as we wish it would go on forever, but the memory does not. In some ways, memories become sweeter in the remembrance.
