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photo: jetheriot
You can go to a concert and watch the performance, or you can watch the performance through a camera recording the performance. Depending on where you’re standing, the rowdiness of the people in the front of you, and the recording capabilities of your camera, the recording may or may not be watchable when you play it back later.
The performer may be grainy, dark, crooked, obscured by someone’s head, or so faraway that you can’t really see what he looks like or hear what he’s singing, but this is beside the point. The enjoyment of the recording happens not at some future date, but at the time of the recording. The act of recording the concert is itself enjoyable. You somehow see the concert through new eyes when you see it framed by the screen of your camera. Even if you just hold your camera up in the air, not looking through the viewfinder, somehow the experience is heightened. You see the concert with new eyes despite the fact that you’re using your same old eyes. Even if you never watch the recording again, even if you discover later that there was no memory card in your camera, the act of recording the concert wasn’t for nothing.
Inserting a camera between your eyes and the world before you gives you a fresh perspective on what would otherwise be an ordinary visual experience. The camera puts a frame around reality. You carve out a rectangular piece of it. You see life like you see a movie or a photograph. Taking a step back from it, you're able to appreciate it. Of course you don’t have to use a camera to see life in this way. You could watch a concert and mentally put a frame around it, focusing the experience that way. You can mentally step back from the screen of life you’re pressed up against and watch it like a movie.
When I first started taking photographs, the thrill of seeing the world in this way was new and intoxicating. Everything was interesting when seen through the lens of a camera. (I have thousands of photographs of beautiful nothing-in-particulars attesting to this fact.) I saw beauty all around me, beauty that was always there waiting to be seen. As it turned out, in order to make something ordinary extraordinary, all I needed to do was to view it through a camera. Reality carved into pictures, days pressed into rectangles. These sights were already special, but until the camera trained my eyes to see the world in this new way, they'd gone unnoticed.
Soon I figured out that I didn’t have to turn every beautiful visual experience into a photograph. It was pleasure enough just to look through the lens and frame off pieces of the world without pressing the button. I didn’t have to physically possess all those beautiful moments as photographs. In fact, there were times when a camera got in the way, sunsets, for example. The finest photograph of a sunset can never compete with the actual experience of the setting sun. Standing on a cliff high above the ocean, the breeze enveloping you, the sound of the surf rising up from below, the moment-to-moment changes in the shape and the color of the sun -- none of these things will make it onto your snapshot. At times like this, I put my camera away and experience the sunset with the camera of my soul. There won’t be a digital document of the experience, only whatever memory has been stamped into my being, but for me the experience will feel richer without the distraction of a camera.
From the Piazzale Michelangelo you can see the whole of Florence stretching before your eyes -- the bleached facades of columned buildings on the bank of the river Arno, the terra cotta tiles covering every roof, the Duomo, turreted towers, bridges across the river getting smaller and farther away, rolling green hills, purple mountains in the distance. The piazza itself, except for a replica of Michelangelo’s David, is unremarkable compared to the panorama of the city it provides. In fact, on Wikipedia, at the entry for Piazzale Michelangelo, instead of a photograph of the piazza itself, is a photograph of Florence taken from the piazza.
The piazza is, to a large extent, the view of Florence it provides. The sweep of the city draws you into its embrace. The panorama pulls your eyes and your camera toward it, inviting you to savor its intoxicating mixture of altitude and architecture and air and sky. When you inhale, you swallow the city. It’s like walking on the dazzling crown of a beautiful queen, and rising up from the center spire of the Piazzale, towering above you and the crown you are walking on, is the cherry on the frosted cupcake, the jewel: Michelangelo's David, a copy of it at least.
Photographs will never capture this feeling. People try nevertheless. When I was there, I stood near the railing, trying to capture that crystalline postcard image, letting my lens be drawn like an iron filing to the magnetic heart of the panorama, the dome, and zoomed in for the close-up, just as a couple and the parasol they were hoisting, wandered into my view-space. My first instinct was to point my lens toward another of Florence's fabulous corners, but decided instead to take the intrusion as a sign. "I'll buy a postcard of the panorama instead," I thought. "But pass up a parasol? In Florence? I'd be crazy to refuse this collage -- the echo of the dome in the shape of the parasol, the tenderness of a husband's parasol-holding, the stillness of their gaze." So I zoomed out and captured an image that you will not find on any postcard or Wikipedia page, a souvenir of Florence + me.
Tourists crowd into the Piazzale Michelangelo to get a glimpse of this view. When I was there, I took in the panorama of Florence, but I also enjoyed the people-watching. One young man became frustrated when, after finally finding the right vantage point for his photograph, was blocked by a fresh wave of tourists invading his vista as his tour guide yelled at him to get back on the bus. I thought to myself, “Here is this magnificent vista, and he’s spending his precious few minutes there frustrated by it instead of intoxicated by it. His photograph will never be as beautiful as the one on Wikipedia he can download royalty-free when he gets home, or on postcards at every street corner of the city. There’s a time to use a camera and a time to put it away. A camera can enhance an experience. It can also detract from it.
Walking through the streets of Leiden with Andrew one summer, we came across an odd duo of street musicians. The man was cranking the shaft of what looked like a gigantic hurdy-gurdy outfitted with a system of pipes, an intriguing monstrosity of an instrument I assumed was one of a kind. A woman sitting next to him dragged her bow across a single-stringed Chinese instrument. It was one of the most unusual sounds I’ve heard. The bizarreness of the two of them, the sounds they produced as well as the visual spectacle of the instruments, caused a crowd of people to stop and look and listen. A tourist, a young girl, paused barely long enough to snap a photograph of the scene. She didn’t examine the scene. She didn’t savor the music. For her, a casual photograph was enough. It was as though the push of the camera’s button was a substitute for a genuine experience. She pushed the button, checked the experience off of her list, and moved on down the street to find more experiences to ignore with a superficial press of a button.
One reason we say grace is to snap our attention to the present, to stop and be appreciative of the food, the company and the other blessings before us, to put a frame around an ordinary moment in time and regard it as an extraordinary occasion. And just as it’s possible to use a camera robotically, substituting rote button-pushing for a genuine moment of reflection, it’s possible to say grace automatically, as a formality without substance, missing the opportunity a more thoughtful saying of the prayer might provide. The word “patter” – as in "stage patter" – refers to the automatic use of speech to pad what would otherwise be an awkwardly silent moment. Auctioneers, magicians and salesmen use patter all the time. It comes from the word “pater” as in “pater noster”, Latin for “our Father”, and refers to the mechanical way some people say prayers, superficially mouthing the sounds of the prayer, like superficially pressing the button of a camera, without a more substantial experience underneath it, absent a deeper feeling.