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. It’s not that I think there is anything especially photogenic about the moment; the sublime is sublime because it exceeds representation, defies it, confronts our puny understandings with phenomena we can’t fully assimilate. It’s more that I want a way to punctuate my contemplation and bring something that I sense should be limitless and eternal — awe in the face of the natural forces that exceed this world — to a tidy conclusion. Once I take the photo, I can pretend that it will go on meditating on the infinite while I switch over to check my fantasy baseball stats.
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.
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.