Bear said to me, if you want to learn photography, you should try taking at least one picture everyday. So of course, ever ready to one-up anything anyone says, I took two pictures today. I am well aware that more isn’t always better, but when you have two good opportunities in one day, you don’t sit around waiting for something better to come along.
Photography isn’t about equipment, Bear said, it’s about seeing. It’s not surprising, because most of art is about seeing. Writing is about seeing. The best writers are the most observant ones, the ones who peer with an introspective eye to see beauty, disaster, humor, and tragedy in everything from a garden snail to a city skyscraper to a girlfriend’s blue eyeshadow. In this vein, writing and photography are the same — can I see this moment in time the way no one else has seen it before? Can I express how this slice of life lives in my memory long after the reality of it has faded?
My memory, interestingly, is like a photograph with a private perspective. In it I have this angle from which only I perceived an event or person, and from which I draw my stories. If a photograph tells a story, it does so because someone took the time to craft the telling of it. Just like you can’t say anything new in a business memo, you can’t usually capture anything that anyone else hasn’t already seen while shooting away on the precipice marked “vista point” on the map. You have to develop your own way of seeing that isn’t found on maps and in form letters.
I often wrongly think that I am oblivious to my surroundings, simply because people are constantly pointing out things that I didn’t see. I’ve discovered that this is in fact the opposite; I don’t see the things they see because I am observing something else. This manifests itself only when I write about the event later from a vantage point that, while no one else shared at the time, everyone realized after the retelling of it. Just like in a photograph that shows a landscape or setting or expression that you never thought occurred, a single sentence can describe an observation that no one else made, even though they too were there, on that beach, in that room, with that person.
I hope in my writing, people are able to see my photographs.
