frameless

today I was looking through one of my journals. not the everyday one, or the one about dreams--the little flowery one I started writing in on New Year's Eve 2007. it's a list-journal. the first thing on the list is 'write a song.'

not everything on the list is phrased so imperatively; some of it gets really vague and wishful. one of them is 'publish some photography.' another, a few pages later, says: 'photojournalism.'

I'll have to break that one down, I think. what do I know about what it takes to be a photojournalist? this little photo-essay I wrote years ago can hardly hold a candle to other, actually relevant publications like this, can it?

anyway, there are billions of better photographers, with better equipment and oodles more passion for their medium, than me. that's okay. my amateur efforts will do. I read something the other day (here) about how serious photography should be more about 'the experience of studying some object carefully' than about the end result of awesome photographs. sometimes I can get that way about taking pictures--absorbed in actually seeing what's there and deciding which might be the most interesting way to look at it--but other times...I just want a nice picture. a memory-in-a-frame. a moment recorded in pixels for all the people who aren't standing right next to me.

I was browsing design*sponge earlier today. thursdays are their before-and-after days and it's always interesting to see what people can remake out of old stuff. and there are nice photographs. design blogs need photographs just like cookbooks do, if not more so. it was this post about a newly remodeled bathroom that started me thinking... that bright yellow cabinet looks fabulous in the photograph. it's bright and cheerful and very clean-looking. but it's just a photograph. there's a lot it doesn't tell me. if that bathroom were part of my house, maybe I'd get used to it... or maybe I'd get sick of trying to keep it so clean-looking. as Thomas Hardy tells us, "Men have oftener suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged." that's what that yellow cabinet might end up doing:  mocking me.

and while I'm quoting dead writers, some philosopher named Kenneth Burke once said, "A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing." every perspective comes with a blind spot. whichever angle you take, you still end up leaving something out. is there really no way to consider everything?

I guess not. probably because we couldn't handle things if we could see in every direction at once. maybe it should be enough that we can always turn around, if we want.