As a freelance writer I can make more money on my articles if I also take pictures, so I'm taking a black-and-white photography class at the Manchester Institute of Arts and Sciences.
What I've discovered in the few weeks I've been taking the course is a kind of scientific magic, a combination of chemicals, learning, and luck that make visions appear where before there was only scattering light and routine eyes. I have begun to learn about new transformations, and not just learn about them but actually cause them to happen. That is photography's power: to assemble all the elements that usually flow by us unnoticed into something that can breach our apathy and make our brains tingle with assaults of recognition.
There's an embarrassing element to this as well, at least for I hang around with. With a camera in my hand I'm not shy about pointing it at anything that grabs my interest. With a camera in my hand the whole world suddenly becomes grist, and etiquette falls a little bit to the wayside. I'll stalk young children at the beach, waiting to catch them in that off moment that reveals them. I'll plant myself on my back on Elm Street to get that great angle shot of the Public Service building shooting off into the blue. I'll go through thirty-six exposures in as many seconds, taking fourteen pictures of the same object but at different shutter speeds and aperture settings to see what the camera and film will do. With a camera in hand I feel like I have access to an energy that counteracts stagnancy and cholesterol and drought.
This slight change of allegiance isn't easy for a wordsmith to make. My life is invested with the belief that words make the world, that language is the only sieve that meaning can sift through. Now I have this rival on my hands, a rival immediate and capricious, whose claim is that it can substitute one of its images for a thousand of my precious words. I suppose I could fend it off by saying that we simply have different, but equal, ways of seeing. But it's not so. Something about the way the image floats to the surface of sight in its developer bath has no parallel in language, that magical appearance of coherence from the entropy of photons and silver.
I'm not going to give up writing. But I think my writing will change because the eyes through which I see the world are changing, into shutters and lenses and apertures, where the brain will become film developed by delight. And the means for this fits in the palm of my hand. How often can we have such translations available so locally? Snap. Whirr. Vision.
What's Love Got To Do With It?
Liberal