Through the Viewfinder

What will you choose to hold on to?

Last year I met a time traveler at the renaissance fair. I recognized him because I was one, too. We identified each other by our cameras — his was digital and mine was film, but they both stuck out in a sea of princesses and pirates. We paused for a moment next to a group of feasting swordsmen as he showed me his collection of strangers — grinning court jesters, sparkling fairies, tiny dogs with dragon wings. Someone else trying to capture memories, I thought to myself as we parted ways.

I was fourteen when I got my first camera, and I had no clue what I was doing. A beginner in every sense of the word, I started by pointing the camera at things I wanted to remember and moving the lens until I liked the way my subject looked. Click.

Sometimes I just wanted to see what I could make — playing with the sunlight as it filtered through the trees, attempting a double exposure. Other times I found an image I liked on a blog or in a magazine and tried to recreate in my own way. I was never formally trained, never took a class or read a how-to book or even really learned the terminology. I just sought beauty wherever I could and tried to make it mine.

This approach meant there were plenty of mistakes, but every once in a while, it was the risk, the experiment, or the “failure” that led to my favorite pictures — or at least interesting ones.

Last year I picked up an old film camera after a long break. I felt like beginner all over again, so I returned to that first instinct: Point the camera at something you want to remember and move the lens until you like the way your subject looks. Click.

With film there are few guarantees. You get the roll developed and reunite with your memories, but they might not look quite how you expect. Blame the grain or the light leaks, an errant finger in the upper corner or a lens cap you forgot to remove entirely. In the worst-case scenario you might lose a picture completely to the light.

Maybe it’s true that film is unreliable and risky and borderline nonsensical in a digital world. And yet I’m starting to think there might be a little bit of magic in the friction, that delay between capturing a memory and getting to hold it in your hands.

Is it in the forgetting, the wondering, or the remembering?

Working with film reminds me to let go of the outcome and find joy in the process. Every so often, I’m rewarded. There’s nothing like the magic of getting prints back, opening up that envelope to discover what magic was pulled from the negatives.

What I’ve recaptured through this renewed interest in photography, I think, is the idea of the viewfinder. Which is really just a frame, right? I’m enamored of the magic the viewfinder works on our attention. Everything else is stripped away, and for a moment there is only you and that rectangle and whatever you have chosen to put inside of it.

The resulting photograph is a way of directing the attention of others to what you, in that moment, found meaningful. A way of saying hey world, look at this! without using any words at all.

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A Photographer’s Watchlist

• Memento: A thriller about a man who cannot form new memories and thus must rely on Polaroids, notes, and tattoos to aid him on his vengeance mission. I’m interested in this idea of memory existing outside of us in the form of a photograph, as something that can be manipulated or lost to time. (I wrote about Memento and the dangers of nostalgia a few years ago for Bright Wall/Dark Room!)

• Faces Places: A documentary about a filmmaker and an artist who set off across France to photograph everyday people and turn them into murals. I love any photography project, but this one is special — Agnès Varda is a personal hero of mine and it’s heartwarming to watch her sweet intergenerational friendship with JR unfold.

• Rear Window: Out of curiosity I spent a little time googling variations of “most famous movie about a photographer” and the consensus seems to be Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller about a housebound photojournalist who starts to believe his neighbor is a murderer. Wikipedia also offered this list of films about photographers, but hard to argue with Hitchcock’s notoriety!

• Perfect Days: This slice-of-life drama about a Tokyo toilet cleaner who takes pictures, listens to music, and reads books remains one of my most beloved watches of last year. It also taught me a new favorite word: komorebi, “the Japanese word for the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind. It only exists once, at that moment.” Photography is about trying to capture that moment.

• Finding Vivian Maier: If you want to go down a real photography rabbit hole, this documentary will introduce you to the mystery of Vivian Maier, a nanny who took more than 150,000 photographs over the course of her life and never showed them to anyone. Her pictures were discovered after her death, catapulting her into posthumous viral stardom. Vivian fascinates me in part because she means different things to different people. The sense I get, given the privacy she maintained around her work, is that photography was something she did just for herself. Maybe we should all have something like that — a form of self-expression that brings us joy, with results that’re just for us.

Updates + News

• Viewfinder + Library zines: In honor of the zine workshop I hosted this month, I created Begin at the Library: a zine to guide you through an adventure at your local library. Pick a path — Choice or Chance — and see what books you end up with! And in keeping with this month’s photography theme, I also made a bonus edition of my Pocket Viewfinder zine. This DIY version lets you pick what you want to keep an eye out for and then provides space for you to log when you found it, so that the zine becomes a record of your adventure after you’ve used it.

• February events: I’m hosting a zine workshop on February 10 and a write-in on February 23 — if you’re local to Connecticut, come join us!

See y’all again next month!