A couple of weeks ago, I bought an old film camera from the 1980s. I still have my trusty Nikon FM-10 from my high school days, but I was thinking of my upcoming trip to Japan and wanted something smaller and easier to carry around, with fewer variables to worry about. I got an Olympus XA2 on eBay. (Funnily enough, it was shipped from Japan.)
The years I was in high school—and this is, yes, very sad to admit—probably represent the creative peak of my life up to this point. I was writing, I was taking pictures, I was designing my own clothes, I was generally forming thoughts and ideas with a level of unfiltered unselfconsciousness that seems retrospectively bizarre for a teenager to have. I frequently ask myself “what happened” to that aspect of me, and there’s no simple answer. A lot of things happened.
One of the things that happened though, is that somehow “being caught taking yourself seriously” became the most mortifying thing imaginable to anyone of my generation. I have seen people with far more talent than I ever had let their creative aspirations get shredded by spasms of self-doubt before anything even gets out of the gate, and I wonder who exactly this really serves. It’s definitely easier not to try, it’s easier to self-deprecate your way out of putting any part of yourself out there, but is it any fun? Why deny yourself the pleasure of doing something you want to do? You could maybe say that the fear of being cringe we all seem to have caught does keep a lot of bad art from being born, but I still see a ton of bullshit being born every day, so something’s gone wrong there.
I have already started my first roll in this camera. For all I know the camera could have utterly ruinous light leaks or something, and I won’t truly find out if it’s usable until I get this roll developed, so I want to get a finished roll in the can as soon as possible. I have promised myself that I will just goof off and have fun, that I won’t prejudge the frame or worry too much that other people will see me as some pretentious weirdo taking photos of the same urban detritus we pass by every day. This hobby was once something that was very important to me, and was once something I wasn’t afraid to be seen taking seriously. But since for now I am only committing to “getting my feet wet again,” I have told myself that there is literally no point in being remotely self-conscious about it. Just point and shoot.
I am still getting a feel for the new camera, but I am definitely goofing off. The first couple exposures are naturally of Cowboy, and I may have taken some of my own TV screen when I was quite drunk on Saturday watching old music videos with a friend. The camera only has three pre-set focus settings (close-up, middle distance, and long-distance) which is kind of a trip. Sometimes the shutter release seems to get stuck, which is annoying. But I took it out with me today while I ran a couple of errands, just in case, and something neat happened very fast—I started really looking at things. It’s hard to put into words, but there’s a way of seeing without seeing that we do just by default, and then there’s what it feels like to punch through that, to actually notice and observe. It’s almost like seeing an alternate dimension of your own world, where everything is exactly the same except for one thing: everything in that second world has the potential to be beautiful.
And I started thinking of my new camera like an infant. Partly because I had to be very physically careful with it, but also because I felt a desire to show it things. Holding the camera’s eye up to something, you see your subject like you’re just seeing it for the first time. When I moved to New York in 2011 and people asked me if I was taking photos up here I would always bitch and moan about how “everything in New York has already been photographed.” And speaking of cringe, publicly remembering that now is such a self-conscious moment—because what a juvenile and audacious thing that was to say!
These were my thoughts on a 20 minute run to the laundromat and grocery store, where the most notable thing I photographed was a single dropped Dorito in the melting snow. Baby steps.
Love this essay, and love that you are getting back into photography! Dad and I made a new friend on our trip - a retired professional photographer from Toronto who loves to travel, cook and garden (!). I am sending her this post of yours, as I know she would love it! (And you would love her, too! She has a great irreverent sense of humor!)