retro post: I wrote a blog for over 16 years at this very domain …and some of it is even worth reposting here again. This might be one of those posts.

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.”

Originally published: November 7, 2013