I have a bit of a strange relationship with photographs. I love to have them, and look at and reminisce about them, but I hate taking them. Maybe that’s not so strange, but most people I know who have a relationship with photographs tend to have the reverse: they love taking them, but don’t know what to do with them after the fact.
Come to think of it, hate might be a strong word. For instance, I don’t loathe taking pictures with the same revulsion I have towards people who deny the school shootings that have affected my community every happened, nor even the sense of deep seated antipathy with which I reject improper use of the word “literally”. Insofar as the act of taking pictures is concerned, I do not actively dislike it, so much as it seems to bring with it a bitter taste.
Why? Well, first there is the simple matter of distraction. A while ago I decided that it was important that I pay more attention to my experiences than my stuff. Before that, I was obsessed with souvenirs and gift shops, and making sure that I had the perfect memories of the event, that I often lost focus of the thing itself. Part of this, I think, is just being a kid, wanting to have the best and coolest stuff. But it became a distraction from the things I wanted to do. Some people say that for them, taking pictures of an event actually makes them appreciate the experience more. And to that I say, more power to those people. But in my case, trying to get the perfect shot has almost always made me enjoy it less.
Incidentally, I do find this appreciation when I sit down to draw something by hand. Trying to capture the same impression as the thing in front of me forces me to concentrate on all the little details that make up the whole, and inspires reflection on how the subject came to be; what human or natural effort went into its creation, and the stories of how I ended up sketching it. Compared to taking photographs, sketching can be a multi-hour endeavor. So perhaps the degradation of attention is a consequence of execution rather than lineage.
I also get some small solace from deliberately avoiding taking pictures where others presumably would take them to post to social media. When I avoid taking pictures, I get to tell myself that I am not in thrall to the system, and that I take pictures only of my own will. I then remind myself that my experience is mine alone, that it is defined by me, and no one else, and that the value of my experience is totally uncorrelated with whether it is documented online, or the amount of likes it has. It is a small mental ritual that has helped me keep my sanity and sense of self mostly intact in the digital age.
But while these reasons might be sufficient explanation as to why I don’t take pictures in the moment, they don’t explain why I maintain an aversion to my own exercise of photography. And the reason for that is a little deeper.
With the exception of vacations, which usually generate a great many pictures of scenic locales in a short time, the most-photographed period of my life is undoubtedly from late 2006 through 2007. Taking pictures, and later videos, was the latest in a long line of childhood pet projects that became my temporary raison d’être while I worked on it. I didn’t fully understand why I was moved to document everything on camera. I think even then I understood, on some level, that I wasn’t seriously chasing the fame and glory of Hollywood, nor the evolving space of vlogs and webshows, else I would have gone about my efforts in a radically different way.
From 2006 through 2007, the photographs and videos rapidly multiply in number, while simultaneously decreasing in quality. The disks in my collection gloss over the second half of 2006, then are split into seasons, then individual months, then weeks. The bar for photographic record drops from a handful of remarkably interesting shots, to everyday scenes, to essentially anything it occurred to me to point a camera at. Aside from the subject matter, the picture quality becomes markedly worse.
We never imagined it, but in retrospect it was obvious. My hands had started shaking, and over time it had gone from imperceptible, to making my shots unrecognizable even with the camera’s built in stabilization. At the same time, my mind had degraded to the point of being unable to concentrate. Everything that captured my attention for that instant became the most important thing in the universe, and had to be captured and preserved. These quests became so important that I began bringing in tripods and special equipment to school to assist.
I felt compelled to document everything. My brain was having trouble with memories, so I relied on my camera to tell me who I had spoken to, where, and when. I took voice memos to remind myself of conversations, most of which I would delete after a while to make space for new ones, since I kept running out of space on my memory cards. I kept records for as long as I could, preserving the ones I thought might come up again. I took pictures of the friends I interacted with, the games we played, and myself getting paler and skinner in every picture, despite my all-devouring appetite and steady sunlight exposure. I was the palest boy in all of Australia.
Not all of the adults in my life believed me when I started describing how I felt. Even my parents occasionally sought to cross-examine me, telling me that if I was faking it, they wouldn’t be mad so long as I came clean. I remember a conversation with my PE teacher during those days, when I told her that I felt bad and would be sitting out on exercises again. She asked me if I was really, truly, honestly too sick to even participate. I answered as honestly as I could, that I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but something sure was, because I felt god-awful.
I was sick. I knew this. I saw that I was losing more and more of myself every day, even if I didn’t recognize all of the symptoms on a conscious level, and recognized that something was deeply wrong. I didn’t know why I was sick, nor did any of the doctors we saw. So I did what I could to keep going, keeping records every day with my camera. I shared some of them. I became a photojournalist for the school newsletter, on account of the fact that I had been taking so many pictures already. But the overwhelming majority I kept for myself, to remind myself that what I was feeling, the deteriorating life I was living, wasn’t just all in my head.
My camera was a tool of desperation. A last ditch stopgap to preserve some measure of my life as I felt it rapidly deteriorating. I have used it since for various projects, but it has always felt slightly stained by the memory.
