Day 202

When I began studying photography in grade ten, I didn’t carry my camera around with me all the time. It was only as my passion for photography began to develop that the world transformed in front of my eyes and beauty began to present itself in places I’d least expect to find it. It took a few unexpected moments of beauty to pass me by when I didn’t have my camera to realize that I needed to carry it around with me all the time. I quickly became obsessed with capturing moments and things of beauty, perhaps because I was so fascinated with the new way I was seeing the world.

When I attended the photographic workshop a couple months ago, someone had asked Bryce Bennett when (or if) he ever puts down his camera. At what point does a photographer stop to enjoy a moment without being behind a camera or feeling as though they have to capture it? Bryce had said that it took him a long time to realize that he could not spend his life behind a lens. When he chooses to leave his camera behind on an outing, he leaves it knowing that he cannot capture everything and that’s okay.

I began thinking about this. I too understand this pressure, this need to capture and document everything I am experiencing. In the past seven months my camera has almost always been tucked away in my bag whenever I go out and this has never been a problem. But while I was in Greece, I began feeling that my need to document everything was getting in the way of actually experiencing what I was capturing.

Yesterday I read Kerry Clare’s “Georgia Coffee Star”, winner of the U of T Alumni Short Story Contest in 2009. The passage below made me think even more about finding the balance between capturing moments but also experiencing some of them without my camera and being okay with that.

“Thomas had viewed so much of their six weeks in Asia through his lens, he might as well have watched it on television. He was utterly incapable of experience, preoccupied with documentation at a level that was disconcerting. Frustrating. Even when his seascapes all just blended into one, he’d argue memories did the same. Which memories didn’t do, Mo was sure. Or at least when they did, they were supposed to, fading and blending all part of a memory’s design.”

I have often taken a picture of a subject, and it is only when I look at it on a computer screen that I see it’s intricate details, its overall beauty. Sometimes it's as if I'm seeing the subject for the first time. This saddens me, for I would have liked to have noticed and experienced these things at the time.

During my last few days in Greece, my camera had run out of memory. I was getting tired of lugging it around and stopping every five seconds to document another moment of beauty. I was not ready to leave my hotel without a camera so I bought a small disposal camera and carried that around with me for the last three days. I have decided that this is the best compromise and the best balance of being able to experience things as well as documenting them. When I have room to take 1,000 photos it is much harder to stop and take in what I am capturing; instead, I find myself capturing the moment or subject through a series of photos.

The last three days in Greece I had only twenty four photos, so one chance to capture a subject. Instead of briefly looking at a subject and then capturing it I was forced to study it, decide if it was worth documenting and really take in its full beauty (or lack of beauty). Out of the 1,000 photos I took during those nine days in Santorini, this one, taken on my £4 disposal camera, is by far my favourite. I can connect with the photo because it brings me back to the overall feeling, smells and sounds of this precise moment, the moment I stopped to finally experience the beauty I was witnessing without being tucked behind my camera lens.