Saturday, July 24
was going to be an essay on photography: notes thereto
today i got my pictures back from europe.
mostly, they suck. this happens for two reasons
— using low end equipment, and using it extremely
carelessly.
i can't make any legitimate complaints
about the equipment - i borrowed my sister's
$20 wal-mart special. i don't even own
a camera. but i really should have paid more
attention to what i was doing with what i had.
what underlies this relentless
self documentation, anyway?
and have you ever noticed how the
middle part of the book, the one with
all the grainy too-small b&w pictures
of things you've been reading about
never lives up to the text?
is that important?
i think it is.
photography (as practiced) is
bad at documenting the
inner life.
and bad at
capturing the sense impressions of a place
or time. it takes a singularly skilled
photographer to bring out the things
that strike the eye and brain.
it also takes good equipment and luck.
even then, the things that hit us
about photographs are often a perspective
unique to the machine.
much as i might regret my failure
to take good pictures, it might be
observed that time behind the varied
engines of artificial visual memory
is often time that might be better spent
in a moment than
in trying to crystallize that moment.
