I hate taking pictures. I really do. People back home keep telling me, "Renee, please take lots of pictures," and I do, to acquiesce them. Still, I am very grudging and unhappy about it, and every time I take a picture, I feel unsatisfied.
The trouble with photographs is that the whole purpose of taking a picture is to capture a moment, to preserve it indelibly in your mind. But the whole act of taking a picture detracts from the moment you are trying to capture. My friend Sylva told me about visiting a fair where there was a million dollar fireworks display. "It was awe-inspiring," she told me, "To tilt your head back and to see the whole sky exploding light. All around me people were taking pictures and looking at their cameras, only to see the whole sky reduced to a two inch screen with a blur of color in the middle. While they tried to capture the moment, they never fully appreciated the moment, and the memory they were left with was one that was just a pale imitation of the moment to begin with."
I think that I've felt a similar tension when I've taken photographs here in Seoul. When I went to the palaces, I took pictures, and then gazed back on the fuzzy, pixelated, and impossibly small image and thought, "It nothing alike." Later, when I looked at the picture again, I found it uninteresting, because I could not feel the soft wind brushing against my sleeves or the feel of gravel beneath my thin-soled shoes. The pictures I took of my students were deleted upon review, because the small, unhappy images didn't laugh and breathe and creep up quietly beside me to whisper, "For you, Ru-nay tee-sher" while slipping a small gift into my hand of a flower, a piece of candy, a picture drawn onto a sticky note.
The problem with memory is it's built on impressions, not accuracy. When I was a little girl and my family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, the first thing my family did when we moved was to visit the big library down town. When I close my eyes, I remember feeling so full of awe and breathlessness. The walk from the back of the library to the front took what felt like forever, and I wondered if it was the biggest building in the world. I remember walking up each step of the library, marveling at the smoothness of the granite, and the way my shadow stretched across the steps in waves. When I got up to the top of the steps, my heart hammered in my skull because I could see mosaic owls tiled into small a small domed ceiling. Inside the library, I clutched my mother's hand and told her, "I feel like I'm a princess." Coming back years later, I was surprised at how my memory disconnected with reality. In my memory, I forgot the drug-addicts who sit huddled on the steps, groaning for money, the black pieces of gum permanently burned into the soft gray of the steps. The owl mosaics, while lovely, are small and dusty. Inside, there are glorious piles of books like in any library, but a modestly pretty interior that doesn't resemble a palace of any sort.
This blog took me a long time to write. I'm only expressing one area of dissent I have with taking photographs, but not acknowledging any of the merits. First of all, there are some memories, especially particularly horrible ones that cannot be left up to our fallible memories to capture. I think especially of pictures of holocaust camps, or villages burning during the Vietnam war that need to be remembered even though they, like any picture, can only capture an infinitesimally small portion of the tragedies surrounding them. Finally, even though I said that pictures aren't as good as memories, I need to say that pictures can stir up all sorts of memories for me. Sometimes all it takes is looking at a picture to be hurtled back through space and time and into that laughing moment.
I think that what my real problem is is that I am not a very good photographer. My photographs don't spark things to life for me. Fortunately for me, photographs aren't the only way to make pictures. My best medium has always been my words, and with my words I can draw images for myself so tangible that when I read them, I once again feel the soft outdoor wind, the soft whispers in my ear, and the soft step of my footsteps as I climb an ever-ascending staircase into a palace full of books.
The trouble with photographs is that the whole purpose of taking a picture is to capture a moment, to preserve it indelibly in your mind. But the whole act of taking a picture detracts from the moment you are trying to capture. My friend Sylva told me about visiting a fair where there was a million dollar fireworks display. "It was awe-inspiring," she told me, "To tilt your head back and to see the whole sky exploding light. All around me people were taking pictures and looking at their cameras, only to see the whole sky reduced to a two inch screen with a blur of color in the middle. While they tried to capture the moment, they never fully appreciated the moment, and the memory they were left with was one that was just a pale imitation of the moment to begin with."
I think that I've felt a similar tension when I've taken photographs here in Seoul. When I went to the palaces, I took pictures, and then gazed back on the fuzzy, pixelated, and impossibly small image and thought, "It nothing alike." Later, when I looked at the picture again, I found it uninteresting, because I could not feel the soft wind brushing against my sleeves or the feel of gravel beneath my thin-soled shoes. The pictures I took of my students were deleted upon review, because the small, unhappy images didn't laugh and breathe and creep up quietly beside me to whisper, "For you, Ru-nay tee-sher" while slipping a small gift into my hand of a flower, a piece of candy, a picture drawn onto a sticky note.
The problem with memory is it's built on impressions, not accuracy. When I was a little girl and my family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, the first thing my family did when we moved was to visit the big library down town. When I close my eyes, I remember feeling so full of awe and breathlessness. The walk from the back of the library to the front took what felt like forever, and I wondered if it was the biggest building in the world. I remember walking up each step of the library, marveling at the smoothness of the granite, and the way my shadow stretched across the steps in waves. When I got up to the top of the steps, my heart hammered in my skull because I could see mosaic owls tiled into small a small domed ceiling. Inside the library, I clutched my mother's hand and told her, "I feel like I'm a princess." Coming back years later, I was surprised at how my memory disconnected with reality. In my memory, I forgot the drug-addicts who sit huddled on the steps, groaning for money, the black pieces of gum permanently burned into the soft gray of the steps. The owl mosaics, while lovely, are small and dusty. Inside, there are glorious piles of books like in any library, but a modestly pretty interior that doesn't resemble a palace of any sort.
This blog took me a long time to write. I'm only expressing one area of dissent I have with taking photographs, but not acknowledging any of the merits. First of all, there are some memories, especially particularly horrible ones that cannot be left up to our fallible memories to capture. I think especially of pictures of holocaust camps, or villages burning during the Vietnam war that need to be remembered even though they, like any picture, can only capture an infinitesimally small portion of the tragedies surrounding them. Finally, even though I said that pictures aren't as good as memories, I need to say that pictures can stir up all sorts of memories for me. Sometimes all it takes is looking at a picture to be hurtled back through space and time and into that laughing moment.
I think that what my real problem is is that I am not a very good photographer. My photographs don't spark things to life for me. Fortunately for me, photographs aren't the only way to make pictures. My best medium has always been my words, and with my words I can draw images for myself so tangible that when I read them, I once again feel the soft outdoor wind, the soft whispers in my ear, and the soft step of my footsteps as I climb an ever-ascending staircase into a palace full of books.
Thank you for writing, Renee. I just woke up to read this after having a dream about childhood memories. In it, I was in my family's house (that my parents are moving out of) and talking to my dad. He told me about a song that he used to play for my brother and me to get us to calm down when we were fighting or wound up. I had no recollection of it in the dream and spent the whole dream searching for the iPod it was on (okay, it was a very inaccurate, painfully modern dream in that respect).
ReplyDeleteIt is hard to take photos that truly capture the fullness of the moment. For me, usually the average photo doesn't intrinsically capture an emotion - look at another person's photos and you will probably not understand why the photo was important for the vast majority of them. For the individual who took them, they can be links, though. I have been going through my parents' house and taking pictures of important rooms, toys and books I had growing up. Even the position of them in our current house recalls memories that seeing the book out of context doesn't. Some people have told me that if it's important, that I'll remember. That's just not true. The absolute essentials, yes I remember them. However, whole events like sinking ships have slipped beneath the waters of my memory and have only been revived by happenstance, by an object or an image of an object. It used to sadden me greatly even when I was a child to know that I had lost some memories.
The way I deal with it now is that I realized that loving the people around me and building friendships now is what matters and that the people I loved but don't see anymore have built into my life and I have built into theirs in ways that cannot be erased.
Dear Renee,
ReplyDeleteI also remember a sense of awe associated with that first visit to the library. Even though I was aware of the gum and the "bums", the wear and the tear, I was still amazed at the beauty of the building and the reverence, if you will, with which it had been built. I almost felt like the building was alive and amused that like a small child playing dress up it had managed to disguise its true self under an invisibility cloak made of time.