Imagery

or What I see when I think about seeing*

My parents bought me my first camera when I was about 10 years old. It was a Kodak Brownie camera and came as a kit: the camera, a roll of black and white film, a neckstrap, batteries and three flashcubes. That was all it took to launch what has become a lifelong love affair with photography. I took a lot of pictures with that camera – pictures of my family, our pets, our house, family trips, and even my toys. I took as many pictures as my parents would allow given the substantial expense of film processing. Amazingly, I still have a few of those images.

I have no idea how many photographs I have taken over the years. A conservative guess might be 100,000, a number that increased dramatically once I switched to digital nearly 20 years ago. Growing up with a camera in hand, I never really thought about why I took so many photographs. Had you asked, I probably would have shrugged. It was just something I did, often to the annoyance of my family.

The real reason for my love of photography became clear, ironically, when, I had no camera.

In the summer of 2003, we spent a week in the Lake District in England. One hot, sunny day, we hiked around Derwentwater, a small lake near our cottage. After several strenuous hours traversing steep hills, we arrived at a long stretch of the trail that followed the lakeshore. Late in the afternoon, I stood on a flat rock at the water’s edge and leaned over to splash some cool refreshing water on my face. The rock tipped and I found myself taking an unexpected swim joined by my beloved Canon A1 SLR. I quickly removed the roll of film and dried everything as well as I could. At first, the electronics seemed to be ok and I thought everything would be fine. However, that was not the case. The camera did not work, would not work, and in fact never worked again.

I spent the remainder of our vacation without a camera. Al had one, so we have plenty of very nice photographs of those last few days. However, I felt oddly disconnected from the trip, almost as if part of me wasn’t there. Without my camera, I didn’t know where to look. There was too much to see all at once; I had become dependent on using the camera lens to focus my attention within the scene.

Photography affects both how I see the world and how I experience it. When I have my camera, I am always on the lookout for something interesting or beautiful and since I am actively looking for interesting and beautiful things, I find them. And, as a result, I have come to expect and believe that the world is an interesting and beautiful place. My photographic skills don’t always measure up and the images I record are not always what I see in my mind, but that is almost secondary. It is the act of finding beauty and reacting to it that gives me joy. Without photography, I would simply forget to look.

The images in this collection represent what I see when I’m paying attention.

*With a nod to Haruki Murakami