Of the Photographic Self

Of the Photographic Self Amy E. Stewart I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking —Christopher hherwood I am not a photographer, not in any expert or professional sense of the word, but I own three cameras. One is a tiny hand-sized, point-and-shoot Vivitar 280PZ (the "PZ" stands for a weak "power zoom" feature) that takes decent pictures in bright sunlight, but turns photographs taken in any other Ught, even with the flash, brown and hazy, inscrutable. It was a gift from my parents that was intended to take the place of a similar Canon camera that I had owned since I was fourteen and that was faUing apart with age. Unfortunately, the Vivitar is handy only because of its small size, its abflity to slide comfortably into the back pocket ofmyjeans. I keep it for day trips, for sunny picnics, for occasions when I know that the light wiU be suitable for it to work and when I won't want to struggle with focusing or shutter speed settings. And so I hold onto it, blowing the dust off of it every six or seven months when it becomes useful. The other two cameras—a Pentax MEsuper SE and an old, fuUy manual Pentax Spotmatic—are recent acquisitions. I have owned them for less than a year. Both belonged to my father, but his vision began to fail almost a decade ago, making it difficult for him to focus manual cameras. Because he refuses to get glasses, insisting that he can see justfine—relying on bifocals only for reading and eating—and because I complained bitterly, brattishly about the ineffectiveness oftheVivitar that my parents had given to me, his cameras feU into my hands. I keep both cameras fiUed with film at aU times, so that they are at the ready if I need to take a shot of something quickly, though I don't really know how to use them. When I first used the cameras, I took three roUs of 175 176Fourth Genre film at night with the flash—two roUs at a friend's party, one at a street fair— and none ofthe pictures developed as I had thought they would. Some were completely blank and the rest were half a picture, a soUd swatch of black covering the lower halfof each one. It wasn't until a drunk at a bar grabbed the MEsuper from my hand and stuttered, "This isn't set right. I took classes, and I'U be damned if this isn't on the wrong setting," that I learned that the shutter speed had to be set at 125 to work properly. I've come upon my knowledge ofphotography in bits and pieces through suggestions from friends, family, and an occasional photographer. At first, I avoided looking up manuals on photography because I didn't have the time, because it seemed Uke too much ofa bother; but then I—I'm afraid a bit stupidly —swore offthe idea altogether. I don't want to learn mechanics. I don't want the cameras to be pieces ofmachinery. But more than that, I don't want their use to be translated into words. I picked the cameras up in the first place when I had begun to realize that there were some things that I couldn't fiflly describe, things that were maybe too complex for language. Or more troubling , there were things that seemed too unbelievable when put into words—too subtle or strange or painful or frightening to be convincing once dissected into sentences and paragraphs, subordinate clauses and parenthetical phrases. Sometimes, seeing is the only route to believing. The color of the gravestones in the cemetery across the street from my house, for example, are gray, the color ofstone, but how do I write, how do I describe the change in them at sunset when they are not only gray? How do I put into words the fact that they glow because of the color of the late day sun, but also that they strike me differently then? They seem to be sending off a light of their own that has nothing...