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 cbertsch | |
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One of the strange, if obvious, things about being the person who is expected to take photographs of family occasions is that there aren't that many photographs of me in the archives that are the product of someone else's hand. We have two cameras, but the urge to document my doings is usually not strong enough to pull me into the frame. It's not a priority. Besides, I've become pretty accomplished at composing pictures in which I appear. Sometimes I'll use the self-timer. Usually, though, I just hold the camera at arm's length and use the judgment I've developed from experience to construct a photograph. I deployed that technique the other day during one of the stops Skylar and I made to look at the view on our drive up to the Sawtooth Mountains:  I like this picture a lot. Skylar is really good -- she has lots of practice -- at not staring straight into the lens, which in this case allowed me to get the looking-in-different directions effect that enhances the visual interest in a composition. And we look as happy as we were. Frequently, when someone sees me holding the camera at arm's length, they ask whether I would like them to take a photo for me. And I always decline the offer, being sure to thank them for the offer. The other day, though, when a man on a purple Honda motorcycle said he would be willing to snap a shot for us, I went against precedent and said, "Why not?" As he was getting ready to release the shutter, I wanted to tell him to watch out for the ugliness of the guardrail and to be sure to get as much of the mountains in the distance as he could. But I stopped myself short. The point of letting go is not to hold on. I was glad to relinquish control for once. It was a good move, too. Later, when we were stopped at a long delay for road construction, the same man who had taken the picture of us got off his bike and walked over to chat for a while. I'm not sure if he would have come over without having shared a moment with us earlier on the drive. And he was an interesting character well worth meeting. How could someone riding the Continental Divide from Mexico to Canada not be? When I was looking over the photos from the trip to Idaho that Skylar and I made last week, I came across the one the motorcyclist had taken. At first, I bemoaned the way the guardrail bisects the frame, the fact that our hands are cut off. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that giving up control over the camera, however temporarily, was the best move I could have made. Sometimes, it takes giving up the reins to figure out their true value.  Tags: autobiography, daughter, photography, travel
Current Location: 85704
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Right. I think one of the reasons why I'm such a fascist about respecting the integrity of the frame is that I think a lot about how today's minor detail -- a short of a store front, a car in the background, the shirt someone is wearing -- will turn out to be tomorrow's point of attraction. Walter Benjamin has an essay where he broaches that subject. So do others, obviously, but I'm a big fan of his writing, making me think of him first. At the same time, I recognize that being a control freak where the entirety of the image is concerned may be the height of hubris. It's all well and good to think that capturing a certain set of objects in the background of a portrait will allow the image to be retroactively endowed with richness years later. But I can't really know which objects will seem more significant than others. Take this shot for example, the analogue of millions like it: 
I wanted a shot that would make it clear we were in New York. And I wanted to capture the neighborhood's late-1990s, high-tech boom look. The twin towers were just a way to convey a lot in shorthand. To me, they always represented the approach to New York, the way you could tell you were within striking distance of something better than New Jersey. Obviously, though, their presence in the shot now overwhelms everything else.
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Beauty. Now, of course, digital changes everything. You can just take 200 pictures, burn them, and wait for your memory to dull.
They say that when you go on vacation you should take lots of pictures because in ten years time, the pictures are the only thing you will remember. now that we are in the digital age, your whole life is your vacation.
I like that shot especially because the Twin Towers are there, but in the distance, greyed out and obscure. The composition leads to them, but they don't dominate. They are just there, matter of factly, a collection of photons. That's a really good picture.
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