We typically take pictures as an afterthought. There’ll be a story we want to tell you, so we’ll snap a picture to illustrate it or at least provide a visual to go along with all the words words words. The picture is never, normally, the point.
Lately, though, we’ve decided we want to learn how to take better or nicer pictures. This is a skill we lack and want to acquire (thanks, Gemini season!). So, we borrowed our father’s real camera (thanks, Dad!) and have gone out, most days, for a couple of hours at a time to take pictures. Rather than looking for stories to tell, we look for pictures to take.
As you can see, we have absolutely no idea what we’re doing.
We’ve read some things about the different aspects of photography, but the terms strike us as impossibly abstract and we can’t hold on to their meaning or significance.
“Aperture” sounds like the stage name of a pale British boy who makes ambient techno, “f-stop” (which might be the same thing as an aperture???) sounds like an arthouse thriller where a regular young woman gets looped into spy shit on her train commute, “shutter speed” sounds like the street name of an off-brand drug favored in East Kentucky, and “ISO” sounds like the abbreviation for a complicated mechanism on a submarine. These words signify nothing to us about PICTURES no matter how much we read about them. We’ve tried, even, to supplement all the fruitless reading by looking at graphics like this:
This is quite possibly the least helpful thing we’ve ever seen because, in practice, one part of the triangle affects the other parts of the triangle and it’s unclear how you’re meant to adjust things just so to keep it all, like, balanced? Much as we’d like to consult THE EXPOSURE TRIANGLE for clarity, we don’t. Maybe it’s a great thing for triangle-based learners, but that’s not us..
In any event, the more we try to learn about photographs the less we feel we understand.
The only true lessons we’ve learned thus far are:
1) There is a thing called a “lens cap” that covers the lens of the real camera and if you do not remove the so-called lens cap then no amount of turning dials or pressing buttons will remedy the absolute darkness of the display and let you take an actual picture. This is a lesson we are still, every day, learning.
2) The dull, mechanical thunk that follows from pressing the “take picture” button (?) is very satisfying. This thunk might be more satisfying than the actual pictures we take. It feels very real. Like the machine is telling us, “Yes. It is done. The picture is complete.” It’s very formal, this thunk.
Not only do we not (yet?) know how to take a good picture, but we also don’t really understand what makes a good picture.
The most we know at this point is that, when we’re walking around, there are moments that seem particularly capturable. (This sounds very kidnapper-y?) There are scenes that we want to possess and take home. (Bravo, that’s the creepiest way you could put it.) There are instances in which something is visually arresting. (Gross.) We recognize that we like the look of some things. (Closer, but dumb.)
There’s some intuitive or felt thing about what we see before our eyes that moves us to engage in a certain type of way. We witness something and want to get figuratively closer to it without getting actually closer to it. It is, it seems, as hard to explain what motivates a photograph or guides its happening as it is to explain why we bother trying to write things.
Taking pictures is, obviously, different than writing, but there’s something similar at root. We register some inchoate aspect of the world that we think could be completed or rendered whole unto itself if we somehow captured it (such an apt, but icky verb).
When walking around with a real camera, it feels as if, somehow or another, the pictures exist prior to their being taken. That verb - “to take” - is maybe telling. You can only take what is extant. You also typically take only when something won’t be given or offer itself up freely. We take pictures that are somehow already there; sneak them away from the world when the world isn’t looking.
The ethos or rationale animating our pictures is much that same as the ethos or rationale that animates anything else we do here. They’re an attempt to counterbalance a media landscape seemingly divorced from the beautiful and often uneventful realities of life in this city. We want to see and show something of the world beyond glossy attention traps or touched-up ads.
We’d like to say that these pictures (like all our words) are simply descriptions of this city and its people as we experience it and them, but that’s not quite right. As much as pictures testify to a set of experiences, they also seem to replace the experiences themselves.
We’ll spend hours and hours aimlessly wandering around various neighborhoods looking for picturable scenes or subjects and all we’ll really remember (after the camera’s battery dies and we get back home) are the fractions of a second we captured. Asked to account for four hours, we can point to four pictures (on a very good day) and little else. It’s as if all the unpictured time didn’t really exist. Or, rather, the time refuses to properly persist in the absence of external evidence. As if the machine took over the duties of memory. Undocumented time just slips away and, with it, us.
We can’t help but seem to disappear from or into the scenes we capture. Looking at the pictures themselves, even seconds or minutes after having taken them, it’s hard to find ourselves behind the lens. We know we framed the shot and turned the dials and made the mirror make that satisfying dull thunk when we pressed the little button, but this is just an inference. We know this like we know that we breathe when we sleep.
Pictures, once taken, seem to justify themselves in our absence. With a picture, it’s all right there (whatever “all” or “there” means). Even when pictures are bad (and we’re still not entirely sure what exactly makes pictures bad), it feels like they do a much better job showcasing the mundane realities we try so desperately to describe with adjectives and nouns. They are effortlessly evocative in a way that (our) sentences aren’t. In photos, the explicit is so explicit that, somehow, the implicit and vague and sub rosa feeling surrounding that overt stuff shines out brightest.
We have no stories to tell about these various scenes. No narratives to offer about the subjects or settings. No beginnings or middles or ends. They’re unspectacular documents that, hopefully, limn the unspectacular character of daily life as it transpires, always in passing, between people in places doing typically unremarkable and immanently forgettable things. They are simple fragments of some days as they were lived by others that by dint of being caught can be shared and in being shared… what? Appreciated? No. Admired? Definitely not. Acknowledged? Yeah, maybe that’s it. Acknowledged. Pictures are another way to acknowledge others or the world, a way to observe and preserve matters differently than we could or would have otherwise.
If we get good enough, we hope, we might get to a place where we - rather than the picture - are an afterthought. We’ll be able to present situations and circumstances where you don’t even catch us looking, but just see what there is to see as if it’s all simply there waiting to be noticed and acknowledged. What a dream, where neither we nor the means we use to communicate get too much in the way of the world as it briefly stands.
P.S. Thanks to Pseudonymous Bosch (aka Mono) for the help with scheduling this post. <3
"they’re catching up on Ooof! Bong! posts after letting them accumulate in their inboxes for a couple too many days."
Yes, and you'd be right.
Hurrah! Looking forward to this venture. That slipping away of undocumented time is wild, no? One would almost think it would gather up, all crystallized-like, on the subsequent pictures we take. So that every image testified to the accretion of its maker's lived experience up to that point... alas.