Sometimes when I am standing on the beach, staring out at the ocean, watching waves roll in, I will become moved with an inarticulate sense of the sublimity of it all, and then, if I have my phone with me, I will take a picture like the one above.
For me, the unphotographable photograph is a kind of index of a moment of experience. It is especially useless in the immediate aftermath, when the experience is vivid and fresh. Years later, though, the image takes on a new life. Or maybe two new lives. In one I care about the index because it tells me stories I couldn’t remember otherwise — aspects of the experience that my peculiarly selective memory didn’t preserve. The image becomes something I can investigate. At the same time it becomes untethered from its initial act of making and can become something entirely new.
What a wonderful post. I experienced an eclipse in 1999, managing to stay in the moment by resisting photographing it, though due more to the known limitations of my very “unsmart” Nokia phone than any superior or puritanical restraint. I was most struck by the response of the wildlife in the area, which, at the moment of totality, seemed to panic in unison. It reminded me of the distance our scientific view has wrought between us and the “land”; that our tools have riven a great divide between a direct contact and relationship with the visceral rhythms of nature and that in that distance lies so much of the violence we inflict upon it. In that moment I felt the nostalgia for the state of myth that you mentioned, the state of narrative immersion. In its place I awed through the lens of science at the delicacy of our balance in the cosmos, the crucial role of the moon, the chaos that would be unleashed in its absence; the mechanics behind the coincidental perfection of its placement and proportion. All of which struck me as rather second-hand thoughts, for such a first-hand, once in a life time experience.
For me, the unphotographable photograph is a kind of index of a moment of experience. It is especially useless in the immediate aftermath, when the experience is vivid and fresh. Years later, though, the image takes on a new life. Or maybe two new lives. In one I care about the index because it tells me stories I couldn’t remember otherwise — aspects of the experience that my peculiarly selective memory didn’t preserve. The image becomes something I can investigate. At the same time it becomes untethered from its initial act of making and can become something entirely new.
What a wonderful post. I experienced an eclipse in 1999, managing to stay in the moment by resisting photographing it, though due more to the known limitations of my very “unsmart” Nokia phone than any superior or puritanical restraint. I was most struck by the response of the wildlife in the area, which, at the moment of totality, seemed to panic in unison. It reminded me of the distance our scientific view has wrought between us and the “land”; that our tools have riven a great divide between a direct contact and relationship with the visceral rhythms of nature and that in that distance lies so much of the violence we inflict upon it. In that moment I felt the nostalgia for the state of myth that you mentioned, the state of narrative immersion. In its place I awed through the lens of science at the delicacy of our balance in the cosmos, the crucial role of the moon, the chaos that would be unleashed in its absence; the mechanics behind the coincidental perfection of its placement and proportion. All of which struck me as rather second-hand thoughts, for such a first-hand, once in a life time experience.