Last post told you that this one would likely be from Africa, or en route. I lied.
I’m still in Atlanta, warming up for the trip, visiting with family, waiting. From time to time in my blogs, I reflect on the experience of travel or on something else that’s on my mind. If you’re not interested in those things, fine, just skim or skip those posts.
For me, photography has always been an important part of travel. I like it. It’s fun. It’s a way to make a record of the trip and to share it with others. You, for instance.
While I’ve taken a few pretty good photos among the 30,000-plus I’ve taken, I’ve never regarded myself as, or aspired to become, a professional. In fact, I’ve been quite amazed at the photos one can get from the newer iphone models and was contemplating taking only my iphone for this trip. Below are a few I took recently with my iPhone at a concert.
A week or two ago, though, I decided, what the hell, I’ll take my Sony 6300. Through the generosity of FreshLens, one of the organizations that Carol and I support through Innovation 80 (if you don’t know Innovation 80, here’s a link to our website, www.innovation80.org), I was able to borrow the same camera and lens I own for Max to use on this trip. I intend to limit the number of shots I take to a relatively small number of what I hope will be somewhat unusual photos. I’ll encourage Max, though, as a first timer to shoot whatever and however much his heart desires. I’m hoping that photographing together will add to our bonding experience.
And I think exploring together through photography is an entirely appropriate venture for a trip to Africa. David DuChemin, a very fine photographer, but perhaps an even finer philosopher of photography contemplates the similarities between making art and exploring, “Art-making is also a posture of the human spirit towards the unknown. It’s a willingness to inquire of life. To ask what we find beautiful, certainly, but it’s more than that.
“It is a kind of exploration that asks important questions about what is important to us and what we’re willing to risk for it. It’s a challenging of our concepts of what we can and can’t do—a confrontation of our fears and our perceived limits. It’s the willingness to look at the maps we’ve drawn of our own lives and hearts and minds, the ones that have “Here be dragons!” written in the empty spaces, yet unexplored, and to go see what’s there all the same, either despite the dragons or because of them.”
I love David’s regular exhortations to take a risk, to do what speaks to you, the public be damned. His approach to photography is an antidote to what Susan Sontag lamented as, “the aesthetic consumerism of vacation photography.”
Anais Ninn, the wonderful French-Cuban writer, said, “The white man has invented glasses which make objects too near or too far, cameras, telescopes, spy glasses, objects which put glass between living and vision. It is the image he seeks to possess, not the texture, the living warmth, the human closeness.”
Interestingly, to me, she focuses on Acapulco as “the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep… Here, all this is nonsense. You exist by your smile and your presence. You exist for your joys and your relaxations. You exist in nature. You are part of the glittering sea, and part of the luscious, well-nourished plants, you are wedded to the sun, you are immersed in timelessness, only the present counts, and from the present you extract all the essences which can nourish the senses.” Ninn’s trip was in 1947. I wonder whether she would still find that kind of magic in Acapulco today, or whether she’d think of Sontag’s aesthetic consumerism.
By the way, please don’t think that I know the work of Ninn or Sontag myself. Most of the esoteric references I am able to make are because of Maria Popova’s fabulous weekly writings in The Marginalian. If you don’t know it, do yourself a favor and look, https://www.themarginalian.org/ Subscribing is free. I should also invite you to do the same thing to get to know David DuChemin’s work, www.craftand vision.com.
Well, you didn’t subscribe to this blog to add to your reading list. Consider that a bonus. And, yes, I really am going to Africa. A bit of patience, please.
