Category: retro posts

  • Photobia

    It was the invention of the digital photograph that may be credited with the reprieve from destruction granted to humanity… or at least for saving us temporarily. 

    I know, dear reader, that this may be a bold and potentially far too dramatic statement to place on the mantle of our budding new relationship, here, now, just like that, but there it is. Fact. A fact I know to be a virtual certainty, a clear and unobstructed truth, viable from a million perspectives, crystalline and as clear and in-focus as any photo I’ve clicked, snapped, plucked from the photons of light scattering through the air. Any. Ever. 

    But then I don’t take pictures any more, do I? Too risky. Too selfish. I ceased that hobby when I learned more of it. After all, it was all there, as plain as the language and words scribbled on these pages, the twists of very phase that we were there using to excuse our actions. I saw it. I saw the truth of it unfold, and it was confirmed for me in a proof so perfect that I could not doubt it, question it, ignore it. And perhaps you too will stop your own frenzy of photographic apocalyptic chaos after what I am able to…

    Ah, but wait; Surely I am getting ahead of myself. 

    It is my failing. This tenacity in me to grasp onto a moment and present it a single, perfectly focused image is still so strong, it remains so firmly entrenched in my heart, soul, my being, or whatever you prefer to call it, that to extend that moment temporally, to weave a path through the here, now and before, to pull it out like a spool of film stretched backwards in time as to explain a sequence, and then to play out the implications after the moment has passed and well into the future thereafter, ah, but it is not a skill that I have honed by my years of clicking shutters and catching instants of light in my lenses. I was a photographer and the haste derived from that skill is core, essence to my being. I regret that now, of course, but that this tale, this rant, this warning should suffer any, unfold poorly, or fall to convince because of that lapse, ah, but that burden is not yours, it is mine.

    See, you already know me I think. We’ve met. We’ve bumped shoulders on the street. 

    Ah. Recall? there was that time in Paris when I was steadying myself against a lamppost, my back turned to the Champs-Élysées while my lens was aimed at some richly flowing frieze upon the Arc de Triomphe. You walked through my frame and I snapped at the exact, precise, inconvenient moment when you stepped between the epic stone monument and my camera, your head turning and your eyes catching in a softly focused blur of confusion that forced me to retake the picture. 

    We were also together, briefly but together, that day in New York City, my fish-eye lens a bubble of elegantly tuned glass exploding the blur of lights, neon, and yellow taxi drag-lines into the perfect snapshot of West forty-second street in the last second of sinking daylight in a photograph that I would have been proud to hang on my wall, but no, no, no, thank you, no, because there was your head smudging, blurring, blocking the lights of the McDonald’s sign against the New Amsterdam marquee from my frame. 

    You don’t remember? 

    Then perhaps I can jog your memory of that day when we knocked elbows, paid our excuse-mes, as we both leaned over a rustic wooden rail bending into a kind of pale misty haze falling out of a mountain scene, zooming in to photograph that waterfall near Jasper. Or the day of the parade when your kid’s balloon persistently strayed into my shot. Or maybe it was you that handed me an awkward glare when I was merely taking photos of my own family in the park and lingering, yes, lingering a little too long on the swings striving for the idealized action shot I had blinking through my mind’s eye. 

    It was somewhere, may have been everywhere, or it certainly was anywhere, but believe me, we’ve met. 

    Ah, but please don’t misunderstand. This is not to imply or inflict some abstract, unfocused blame upon you, dear reader. Blame? Ha! No. Not blame. Blame for what? Blame for something, nothing, everything. Blame for the anguish of ruined photos, ah, no. No. Not blame. 

    No. Oh no. No. No. 

    No. 

    That would never do, indeed no. Blame, not at all. Not for you or me or any one of us alone. No. Rather. Well, rather it’s merely, simply, wholly that we are acquainted, you and I, somehow, if you know it, believe it, share that knowledge or not, and within the frame of this notion I share my picture of the impending apocalyptic ruin, end and doom of humanity. Just that.

    Just that.

    Just that. And who ever would have thought our eventual demise would be filtered through a lens so seemingly benign, so innocent, so… so… ah, but there I go again.

    It starts like this: it starts with the simple understanding that when I was a boy I was also a scout. That was me; Picture it. A neat-and-tidy uniformed, nature-strolling, camp-fire-building scout standing with his trusty red-plastic army knife tucked into a faux-leather utility belt and an orange scarf neatly woggled around his young neck. We camped. We crafted. We sang songs. We pledged allegiance to mysterious English lords long since dead this past century, and saluted proudly to the flags of our country and our club. I tell you this now, dear reader, because it is important that you understand one of those oft-recited mottoes, a rhyme, a creed, an elegant maxim of old-fashioned wisdom that peppered my actions then and thereafter, for a long piece of my adult life, and even now haunts this very treatise. We had a motto that would be repeated, sage wisdom flung to anxious children as they clambered out of a crowded sport utility van dislodging themselves from civilization and stepping into the wilderness. Our voices would sing it out to fellow scouts if we caught them dropping a wrapper from a snack, or snapping a still-green branch from a tree. “Leave only footprints,” we’d chime with the sing-song air of a memorized credo, “take only photos.”

    Take only photos. Take only…

    Photos? PHOTOS? Just photos. Just that.


    August 1998

    I was packing. “How many rolls of film do you think I should take? Five? Six?”

    “You can always buy more.” She says.

    “Twenty-four photos per roll at six rolls, that’s, uh… about a hundred and fifty pictures. Is that a lot of pictures? It doesn’t seem like a lot a pictures to me.”

    “Depends.”

    “It is my first time over to Europe. How many would you take. I don’t know, but it seems like there could be quite a bit I’d like to photograph. I don’t think I’d use a whole roll every day, but it’s three weeks. Three weeks. Twenty one days. Or is it twenty-two? No, right, twenty one. And only one hundred and fifty photos. It… it seems like I might take more than five or six photos per day, you know?”

    “You can buy more film. They sell film in Europe.”

    “But do I want to always be looking for places to buy film?” 

    My nerves are not my friends when I travel. They get the better of me. Always have, always will, I suspect. I am not a fearful traveler, but I stumble through the unknown with both hands outstretched and my feet plodding, scuffing, stumbling along with methodical care and attention. Travelling didn’t come naturally, either. Some people see the world and grab onto it with both hands. I wanted to reach out. I wanted to grab it. I wanted to soak it in, flit from place to place, country to country, new world to new world, absorbing the people and the culture, dropping into another culture, another city, blending with perfect fusion of ease and certainty. I wanted to be the guy who stepped off an airplane with perfect confidence and waved for a taxicab to scoot him off to an important place or vital meeting, I wanted to be seamless and noticed all at the same time, blurred into a geography not my own. But I was not that guy. Instead, I fumbled with maps, and studied unfamiliar street signs, I was the guy who looked up into the sky as if it would help me orient my latitude with the grace of a mythological ranger, as if seeing the glare of the sun would shine an all-knowing beacon upon my destination. I was not that guy. Oh, no. Not he. No. No. No.

    “They sell film everywhere. I’m pretty sure.” She insists. “You can very likely buy it from shops on every street corner or even from little old ladies selling their baking from baskets. Anywhere. Everywhere.” A pause. “You are going to a place that thrives off of tourism, so you think they are going to miss the chance to sell you something as fundamentally important as film?”

    “They have that?”

    “What? Film?”

    “No. I mean do they have little old ladies selling muffins out of baskets?”

    “I have no idea.” She sighs. “I’ve never been.” She says, she begrudging me jealous, but she is going back to school and I’ve graduated. “I’m just talking, you know? But they will have film. Everyone has film.”

    “So, how many rolls of film do you think I should take?”

    “Take five.” 

    “Five? And buy more?”

    “Yeah.” She says. “Just buy more. It’s just film.”

  • retro post: what i learned on summer vacation 

    Perhaps it’s a little abstract… but then that’s the point.

    Everyone with whom I have had more than five minutes worth of conversation these days wants to know: “What did you enjoy most about Europe?” — and I stumble through the fragmented and chaotic answer that, simply, there was just so much to see and so much diversity that I can’t, honestly, pick one thing that I enjoyed “the most” without discrediting the rest of it. And now, nearly a week after my last bumbling moments through the dutch countryside, I still couldn’t put my finger on one precise moment in time when I said to myself: “Hey, this is THE moment. This is IT. This RIGHT HERE is my vacation at it’s peak.”

    Wouldn’t that just be too simple. 

    Thinking about this problem has led me down an interesting path, however. I think I could see it from afar even when I was racing through the multiple cities and countries, riding in a train or bus or driving a car, eating multiple gourmet meals, drinking a broad selection of beer and wine, retracing steps through cobble-stone streets or even just waking up each morning and pushing away the fog to recall what country I fell asleep in the night before. Perhaps even Karin and Ryan could pick out that moment when traces of the theme appeared literal in snippets of conversations or examples bubbled to the surface of contemplative moments in random locales.

    So, what did I learn on summer vacation? The exact words haven’t exactly ‘gelled’ in my mind yet, but I think — I think — it has something to do with the contrast between REALISM and IMPRESSIONISM — in art, in form, in function, in life. Everywhere. The contrast. The purpose. The deception. The truth. The pursuit. And even, as it were, the consequence — positive and negative — of following those paths. 

    Huh? 

    Though, of course, I can’t speak to the ineffable experiences of my travelling companions, near, close, or far, if I’m referring to the other two or the other fifty. It doesn’t even matter. Everyone gets something completely different from a so-called adventure through the world and I wouldn’t assume to enforce what anyone else got from their own wanderings any more than I would take (with good humour) having my own moments interpreted. But I need to solidify this (in as much as that is possible) so that I can go back to normal life and stop pondering the meta-purposes of vacation and just happily incorporate them into my humble existence.

    Life goes on, they say.

    One of the most literal examples that hangs in my mind is age — and what is REAL age? We saw some (arguably) old buildings. Commonly, buildings built as early as the 12th century (plus or minus countless generations). They were all over the place, with museums, restaurants, shops and stores, internet cafes, Pizza Huts, and storage rooms stuffed into their interiors. Eight hundred year old buildings being used to sell french fries or store folding chairs. But how REAL are those buildings? The bricks and sandstone is replaced every other decade. Some were bombed to rubble in the various wars, and rebuilt exactly as before on the same foundations. Wood rots and is replaced. Halogen lights dangle from medieval architecture. Are those REAL buildings? Or are they just IMPRESSIONS of old, long-since-disassembled structures for we moderns to enjoy?

    Or, consider the example of Prague. I’ve now been to Prague. At least, I think I’ve been to Prague. We saw the city and it’s life brimming from the seams of a tourist haven. We sheltered our visit by prancing through palace, stepping carefully across the Charles Bridge, buying tacky souvenirs and ice cream from abundant shoppes lining the narrow, winding, cobble-stone streets. I wonder: was this REALLY Prague? Or was this an IMPRESSION of Prague: an idealized simulation of what Prague might be if it were just an example of modern tourism: Beer, goulash, and “Czech Me Out” t-shirts in every store window. When the rain came and washed away all the tourists the square was uneven as if something was stewing below trying to gurgle out.

    Karin noted my third example: Language. There was only a single occasion over the course of three, widely-travelled weeks when English was insufficient. We ordered pizza in a small city in Slovakia and the waitress fumbled to communicate with us. We ate only because our fingers were adept at pointing to the menu in the appropriate places. But everywhere else — EVERYWHERE — I could communicate verbally in English to whomever I happened to meet. Some might insist that this is great. Sure. No effort on my part. Why complain? But was that REAL? Was it authentic? Was it something that represented an exact picture of the culture and people in who’s city I was a visitor? Or, what was it? An IMPRESSION? A feeling on the canvas that had been painted there to help me feel comfortable about my travels? An interpretation of Polish or Hungarian culture splashed across a North American theme.

    We discussed the (literal) REALISM versus IMPRESSIONISM with Henk who’s bias leans towards interpreting emotions on canvas. His art is impressions of his inner thoughts and deepest beliefs. He expressed his disappointment at the abundance of REALISM in Canadian art. So many “Grizzly Bears” and “Mountain-Scapes” does not seem to compare with dynamic feeling evoked by interpretable art. I wonder about blogging: this is REALISM. This is life, scripted. This is a photographically concrete image of what happened today. This is a precisely painted Douglas fir standing beside a river with glistening salmon jumping in the currents. REAL. But I want to write more IMPRESSIONISM.

    I took photos of grafitti in Eastern Europe. When I was caught, my travelling companions spying me out of the corner of their eye snapping a digital recreation of some Polish spray paintings, there might have been a bit of a chuckle. But then grafitti is IMPRESSION isn’t it? Loosely? Culture art seeps from the hearts of the people and erupts onto repeating surfaces of granite and marble, sandstone or cobble-stone.

    I rode on a bus for two weeks with a cross section of North American and Oceanic personalities. We had all arrived at a small hotel on the fringe of central Berlin with passports in hand but very little else tying us to our true personalities. Names and birthdates, countries of origin, and anything else we dared to express of ourselves. What happens in Europe, stays in Europe? Maybe. But what is REAL? Who is REAL? Is that guy with the hangover every morning really a tea-totaling moralist? Is the outgoing girl at the back of the bus really just shy and reserved. Does the smart guy with his nose in his book really burn away his days at home playing video games? Or, is the quiet couple near the front of the bus really taking a break from being the outgoing centres of attention back home? Who can say? Did we all just become IMPRESSIONS of who we’d like to be when we get on a bus full of strangers? Or can we even change the REAL?

    And of course there was my camera. Thirteen hundred photographs slipped neatly onto a wafer-thin memory card, glimpses of fragments of cities. Extracting the essence of the life into pixels is what we all happened to do, each of us, toting around cameras and flashing the shutter open for fractions of a second for what? A glimpse of the REAL so we could bring those memories home and relate them to our families and friends who couldn’t travel with us. But those literal images are REALISM subject to IMPRESSIONS of our memories. Nothing more. I called my incessant snapping “photo journalism” wherein scenic shots were bracketed by reference shots, or foot shots, or people shots, or artistic elements to be pasted together later. It was all to refresh my own mind, to flash my own IMPRESSIONS into something concrete so that there might be a glimpse of proof to my memory. For what it is worth those captured moments can never be experienced again. I took those photos because the moment was interpreted as special — irreplaceable — a glimpse of a fraction of a second to be recalled for as long as I can make the image last in my head, on paper, or as data. There is nothing REAL about it.

    But then what’s the point? What DID I learn on summer vacation? We travel about the world, leaving our lives and our things behind (mostly) locked safely in our little homes. We walk out the door, we get on an airplane, and the next thing we know we’re barrelling across Berlin in a train, drinking red wine on the Danube, or frying schnitzel in a camping trailer in a small country village in the middle of the Netherlands. And then it all becomes just a memory. I guess I affirmed to myself both something obvious yet also something that lends to the further interpretation of life: REAL lasts for a fleeting moment, but as humans with minds and imagination we are left to give out IMPRESSIONS to the world. We express, that’s all. I hinted at this earlier, but maybe I’ve been a little hard on myself. I’ve been aiming for the REAL. I’ve been aiming for precise, exact, but fleeting moments when all I can do is provide impressions of it all. And that could be something elusive yet satisfying: art, words, thoughts, everything. Maybe this seems a little dissatisfying for you, I having travelled the world and come back with nothing more than a glimmer of philosophical existentialism. But then again, this is just my impression.