glow.like.berlin

It’s never occurred to me to call myself a photographer, but every now and then, I find myself having a good long thunk about photography and what might it all be about?

One of the things I’ve decided is that an important catalyst for taking interesting pictures (that is to say, for a non-photographer like me) is the circumstance of being thrust into an unfamiliar landscape or a strange new situation — your sense of sight takes on a new depth, a certain sticky thickness, as if you were experiencing color vision for the first time.

[White: the breathless, glittering wide-eyed sweep from the top of your first alpine ski slope. Green: you straighten up slowly after a morning of hacking at sugar cane with a machete has left you doubled over, panting and sweating-- to have the plush wetness of a Costa Rican jungle glade overtake you suddenly and completely. Pink: a burning shock of sunset over water, somehow smoldering that much deeper for being on a foreign horizon.]

When you take a daring leap outside of your routine, you are big-eyed and bandy-necked as a barn owl, turning your head all the way around in one direction, turning it all the way in the other. You are alert as a fox in a farmyard, ears pricked, intelligent little eyes glowing in the dark.

With your feelers thus extended, all the flurries and scurryings in all the far-flung corners of your perception suddenly signify; happenings seem orchestrated, premeditated, curated. The dusty chaos of a city street feels organized as an art gallery (click!), the little scenes unfolding in a Viennese restaurant feel like a piece of theater (click! click!); a fluttering of doves (click!); a flash of red fabric (click!); a bicycle in the rain (click).

But when I move through spaces that I’ve thoroughly explored, a camera around my neck feels like dead weight.  Why would I take a picture of something I see with my own eyes every day? [A rhetorical question! I'll be answering it in a minute.] But I guess the aesthetic anaesthesia is just a routine process of my brainsicles, pluckily arming themselves against the dangers of overstimulation: if I spent all my time noticing things, I would be constantly overwhelmed by a stupid sense of wonder, like a baby: goggle-eyed and wordless.

I would short-circuit in a puff of smoke, like a robot in a swimming pool!

The ironic problem with digital photography in particular is that it is limited by its limitlessness; if you can take a picture of everything, why take a picture of anything? And if the photo looks just like the real thing, where is the magic, where is the little transformation, the click and whirr of tiny golden gears that shifts the photograph into another dimension and renders the image a self-contained world unto itself?

On a recent drizzly, clammy Thursday afternoon (O Berlin summer, why have you forsaken me?) I learned that the inverse of the original theorem can also be true: that under the right circumstances a camera in itself can be the catalyst for a reinvestigation of your natural habitat. On the advice of a (pretty baller) friend, I bought a Holga 120 CFN camera, which looks like a crappy plastic toy, but somehow takes pictures that look like gauzy still frames from my most elusive dreams.

Stalking around Friedrichshain, squinching my eye up to the viewfinder while aiming my new secret weapon, I saw everything framed in a little plastic bubble. I saw my old familiar neighborhood begin to take on that seductive sheen of secretive extra-reality again. And there was the careful question of cause and effect, which digital photography sweeps under the rug — the terrible significance of shifting your weight this way or that, focusing just so, the patient play of light and shadow — with only 12 frames to illuminate before the film would have to be surrendered to the ancient alchemy of the stoic sorcerers, their shadowy seance bathed in hot red light.

But look! The pictures aren’t what I wanted at all. They’re underexposed and out of focus.

Somewhere between the reflections and refractions and reactions, the interfaces and exposures, a spooky, topsyturvy new universe has shimmered into view, which exists in a dimension my eyes alone can’t see. (Like in that episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, which was hands down the scariest one ever.)

In these images, my life feels Lynchian.

I relinquished control & followed the urgent urgings of the Lomo lens into a nearby cemetery I had never entered before (see top.)

Down the rabbit hole.