My first camera was a heavy manually operated 35-millimeter model that my parents gave me when I was about 14 years old. It was far from cutting-edge, as newer cameras had built-in light meters and other battery-powered accessories; this one didn’t.
But I was satisfied. An older camera conformed to my ideal of what photography was supposed to be. Photographers were taciturn loners, mainly men, who roamed the world wearing rugged expressions and wearing complicated vests whose many pockets they actually needed to hold the many light meters, film canisters, filters, airbrushes, notebooks, and other accessories they needed for their craft—to say nothing of the unfiltered cigarettes, and exotic foreign currencies needed for bribes, and matchbooks on which wannabe girlfriends had scrawled phone numbers, all of which the most rarified members of the guild no doubt took along when they went off to photograph wars or other parlous international stories. They did not want, or need, their tasks to be shortcutted by battery-powered film advances and other innovations. They knew through long experience what exposure was warranted without recourse to a light meter; they were well practiced in the quick flick of the thumb needed to advance the film; they wanted their cameras to have heft, and to be scratched and dented by heavy use, as the used Pentax I unwrapped already was. The ideal foreign correspondent’s camera, I was sure, would be one that had at some point stopped a bullet but still managed to keep working.
Photography seemed an ideal pastime to me, a shy kid who always felt more comfortable as observer than participant, as the best photographers had a fascinating ability to gather attention in print even as they remained ever out of the frame in real life. This was an alchemy as mysterious as what I soon came to witness in the basement darkroom my parents helped me set up, where in the dim glow of filtered lights I was able to watch black-and-white images well up on what had been blank paper as the sheets soaked in viscous developer fluid. Each liquid had its own peculiar smell and consistency: developer, stop bath, fixer, a progression that converted a one-time happenstance of light into something permanent. If figuring out how to take a decent image with a manual camera was its own learning curve that involved calculating shutter speeds and lens-opening settings, the work of testing how to enlarge and print the results in the darkroom seemed even more mysterious.
What I am trying to work my way up to saying here is that photography was to my adolescent self very much an art form, and that I cast a wary eye on anything that threatened to take that cachet away from it. That included the sorts of travel snapshots that resulted from any family vacation, or the “football team pics,” as my cousins and sisters called them, that always had to be taken when a family Thanksgiving or Easter fest was memorialized with an Instamatic. This was a tension that plagued me when I was older and could travel on my own, when I found myself wrestling with constant questions about why I was taking a particular picture. Taking good photos together with friends was a challenge in the days before smartphones; and if I wanted to simply remember my visit to the Tower of London, surely some postcard photographer had done a better job of it than what I could manage in my couple of hours there.
All of which helps explain why I have carried an abiding skepticism about photography into our current image-saturated era. The adolescent self that still dwells within wants the act of capturing images from the world to still be cool, and hard, and it’s anything but. Photography has become, more and more, how we mediate and share our view of the world, and even how we experience the world, period. A social media post lacking a photo is a sad thing, a thought orphaned without its visual summary. A get-together with friends that isn’t memorialized with an ussie runs the risk of becoming immaterial in memory, unremembered. Same with a sunset.
It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the same technological innovation that allows us to so easily capture so much of our experience—namely, the conversion of the inseparable flow of light into discrete pixels—also opened the door wide to the easy manipulation of reality as it is recorded. Stalin’s photographers had to struggle in the darkroom to excise newly disgraced (and often executed) former comrades from the era’s black-and-white photos. Today, a few clicks of the mouse, and it’s hello, deepfake.
But that’s another story. What I want to remember is how last weekend I was standing with old friends on a beach in Oregon, hoping to see a solar eclipse. Cloudy skies prevented that; it was hard to tell where the sun was, period, let alone see how much of a bite the moon had taken from it. But it wasn’t hard to hold up a smartphone depicting a real-time feed of what the eclipse looked like elsewhere—to have a sort-of experience of the event. The friends were still there, the sand cool and wet underfoot, but we could see the big event itself only through a screen.
I probably won’t remember much about what that event was like visually. At a time when my brain too often seems overstuffed with stimuli, with information, seeing an eclipse on a phone screen probably doesn’t rise up to the top of the Views To Be Remembered list. What I am much likelier to recall is all of what could not be photographed: the reconnections with old friends, long-forgotten memories of their ways of talking or walking, the way sharing stories with them stirred up mental images of places and events we experienced together but that remained unrecorded on film or screens. In a very real way, they’re more interesting because they were unphotographed.
I treasure the few photos of the times I spent together with those friends, decades ago. But I treasure more the way memories ride with me. Those memories are fickle companions, I realized as we shared our different versions of what we’d experienced together so long ago. But to me it’s more important that life be a storehouse of memories than a storehouse of images. If they keep changing over time in a way that photos don’t, that process itself seems like it might be a good synonym for living.
