January 15, 2017 Camera
I have a picture of a Catholic saint leaning on my computer as I write this. It was given to me by an Italian colleague, who rushed to get as I told her that my camera had disappeared — “It has always brought me luck”, she said.
This is the kind of reaction I have got when I told others about the disappearance of my camera: It prompted shock, then empathy, followed by the question how it could have happened. I don’t really know, I would say: I had stuffed the camera into my coat pocket, went to this bar, and when I left the building, the camera was gone. Was it stolen? Perhaps. Did I drop it into the snow before entering? Perhaps. Did the discovery make the blood in my veins freeze? Certainly.
When I was growing up, my father had his trademark way of mitigating the pain of breaking an object. “Es ist nur ein Gebrauchsgegenstand”, he would say — “just a thing you use”; implying that wear and tear would whittle down even the most prized possessions. It’s a healthy attitude that I reminded myself of on the subway ride home, fists clenched in my empty coat pockets, knowing that a camera could easily be replaced.
I’ve lost a number of things over the years: Keys, glasses, sunglasses. I’ve also dropped a camera lens down a ravine and shattered multiple iPhone displays. “You can’t have nice things”, my friend Beth once told me, with a mix of pity and amusement on her face. I had come to accept this, but the disappearance of the camera felt different: much more personal than the loss of any other object. I loved this tiny, powerful camera that felt not just like a marvel of engineering but also like an extension of my eye.
I’ve never had anything that let me so perfectly capture what I was seeing — and thereby document what I was noticing or thinking about. I am suddenly a photographer without a camera and I can’t help but wonder whether that paradox should mean something. It’s a forced reset that comes at a time when I was wondering how to take my photography to another level: How to elevate it from mere picture taking to the craft of stringing those pictures together.
The grand irony of this story is how I spent my time at that bar: I was killing an hour before meeting a friend, and so I wrote some emails and researched cameras on the internet. My quest to rethink photography had created the impulse to splurge money on an even fancier device. It’s a common trap to believe that you’ll be more creative with better gear, and certainly one that I’ve fallen into in the past.
What I realize now is that there’s a flip side to my dad’s saying: “just a thing you use” doesn’t just mean using something until it breaks. But also means making the most of it — with a sense of purpose.