When I saw this word, it seemed a given that I had to write about me as the photographer. The picture above I took for fun while waiting in car for Terry to finish band camp.
When I was looking for pictures of my father’s 90th birthday, it was striking to me that I had really not taken many photographs during my life. I do have a lot of photographs, but that is mostly a consequence of other people taking them and giving them to me. Looking through those pictures, it is clear that the most fascinating ones contain people, especially people I know.
My family just never took photographs, although there are boxes and boxes of Kodachrome slides from a trip my parents took to Russia circa 1960. My father kept with pride a special folder in his office files labeled “FBI” which documented the FBI investigation prompted by their subversive destination. Those slides might have some social or historical value, and there even might be a few that are awesome images. But, since they have no known people, they are pretty boring.
Aside from a couple of rolls of instamatic film shot when I was about 12 and a handful of disposable cameras over the years, I never took pictures either until about six years ago, when Joe and I met, and he gave me a little Nikon Coolpix. That gave me the bug. Now I take pictures all the time, almost every day. Yet hardly any of those thousands of photographs document family or family events. I just never think to point a camera at a person, especially in the midst of a gathering. And, the selfie-craze notwithstanding, teenagers can act as though they’ve been assaulted if you point a camera in their direction. No, for me, the excitement and solace of photography combines that of a puzzle with that of art. Out there is the wide, beautiful world. Here is a camera. It distorts, flattens, limits, records colors oddly, is hyper-sensitive to the light, etc. How do you make the camera see some aspect of what you’re seeing? Think of video games or crossword puzzles or any logical puzzle. Once the puzzle is complete, the task is over and I never look at it again.
Thinking about this contradiction (loving pictures with people and taking pictures with no people), I’m thinking that I’ll try to do a month of documenting people – family, events, dinners, occasions, guests, outings, etc. Perhaps I’ll combine these photographs with brief diary-type ruminations. One thing I have learned from this July Word(s) of the Day project is that projects with writing should only be undertaken when one is busy! Otherwise, the writing just takes too long. I think perhaps August will be busy enough. I started to write a list of the occasions coming up in that month, but realized that the better time to document these would be as they occur…
Beautiful image with such a good abstract feel. Loved reading your story about how you got the photography bug. Photographing people close to us is how we preserve memories so a personal month of documenting people sounds like a great way of keeping those memories!
Awesome capture and processing! Very interesting narrative - my family did take photos (and Dad loved the movie camera and his slides) Definitely our most precious possessions. I only wish I had taken many more photos - if I knew how much the old photos would mean to me today, I would have never put the camera down!
I think you should start a challenge for the month of August for folks to do the people documentation. Come up with a tag for them. Could be very poignant, especially for those of us getting ready to send some of our people off to college! :-(
