Excerpts From Photo Diary
A new novel by Janet Carson (2010)
For The Non-Believer Quarterly, Issue 37
On Monday, she walked around and closely witnessed the messy act of human decision-making that created everything in her peripheral vision. Two houses of contrasting architectural style and condition framed a variety of shrubs, automobiles, and gardening tools. People were negotiating such different lives, yet in such close proximity to each other. She felt that by photographing it all, she could prove her understanding of what was taking place around her. After all, she liked to believe that she was an intelligent and sensitive person. In a single day, she took 600 pictures with her new digital Nikon D90.On Tuesday, she awoke and once again reached for her camera. She wanted to make original stories. She wanted her stories to be both mysterious and dramatic. She photographed the shadowy spaces within hedges, the coming of dark clouds, a road that disappeared along an ascending bend, and a well-dressed woman searching for something in her handbag. She wondered, 'are these not my own stories'?
Wednesday, our protagonist didn't want to leave her apartment. However, she still took some pictures. Setting up still-lifes in her living room, she decided to capture the formal beauty of everyday objects - her objects. Taken out of the context of their daily use, her possessions gained their own independent voices. She felt that it was the objects - bananas, bathrobes, vases, dolls, CD-R cases and Scandinavian dinnerware - that were actually dictating the photo shoot.
Thursday morning, she awoke with a sadness that she couldn't quite place. She thought about the concept of compassion - 'to suffer with' - and made it her goal to better understand the feelings and emotions that people hinted at through their actions and body language. She set off for a crowded area of the city and photographed people using an old manual camera and black and white film. She watched not only their faces, but how their hands held onions, how they sat on cold benches at dirty bus stops, how they ate strings of pasta at the cafeteria, how they reacted to being photographed by a woman in a red winter coat.
On Friday, she didn't take a single picture until late in the evening. In fact, she didn't even leave her house until 8:00 p.m., when two of her friends picked her up and accompanied her to a trendy downtown jazz club. As they drank some red Argentinian wine (malbec), the up-tempo beat created by the musicians began to take over. With arms and legs swinging, everyone danced up a storm. From the vibrating wooden floor, she photographed both the musicians and the moving people. To emphasize the motion and pulsating aura of joy around her, she opted for slow exposures that dramatically blurred the human forms and upraised saxophones. Heck, she was drunk.
Unable to sleep-off her hangover due to the incessant chirping of birds, she awoke early on Saturday and peered out over the small park that lay below her bedroom window. A dog walked towards its owner with a saliva drenched frisbee in its mouth. An old couple sat reading a newspaper on a bench while sharing a thermos of what was presumably hot tea. Several children scrambled in the dirt in chase of a soccer ball, which was heading towards a homeless man, asleep under a large maple tree. She suddenly decided that she must use her camera to catalog all of these activities - document every activity in the park.
Though Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, a day of the 'Lord' in some parts of the world, she got up early and set to work. After connecting her camera to a microscope, she pulled out the biological slides that remained from her university research. Amoebas, blood cells and other microorganisms came into view as she turned the focusing knob. However, she also noticed the air bubbles and scratches in the slides - which had an unrehearsed beauty that made her imagine a future Asian calligraphy. These were all things that she couldn't really see with her own eyes. Yet, she could - and did - photograph them. After several hours, she put the equipment away and turned on the TV. The news program instantly transported her to a parliamentary diet session, to violence in Afghanistan, to a pulverizing earthquake, to a clean white laboratory where new computer technology was being tested and improved. She began to dream of a new technology that allowed her to photograph with her own eyes - by simply blinking. It was decided. She would spend the following day using this newly imagined power. She would capture everything.
It was a new week. The rain outside made her appreciate how cozy it was inside. 'If I could photograph this...' she thought and gazed across the room at her camera and new wide angle lens. However, after devouring a donut with her customary coffee, all thoughts turned to writing. There she was at her computer typing away a new article about architecture and desire. Some buildings were created in the dreams of mad geniuses. Others were places born from logic - clean, white and open - where dreams could either ferment or take flight. She wanted to spend her life in both architectures simultaneously, but it soon cleared up outside and she became drawn to the wet streets and fluorescent-lit supermarket several blocks from her apartment - Super Savings Mart.
Tuesday morning, she had a promise to fulfill. Her sister-in-law had asked her to photograph her two nieces on their first day of school. Taking the bus out into the suburbs, she imagined the future lives of the photos - 10 year periods of abandonment followed by bursts of surprised amusement. The photographs would hopefully go through a process that turned them a little yellow and brittle. This would give them some integrity. However, there are so many unknowns with digital prints. Would they want data files instead of prints? What kinds of miraculous technology would her nieces be using by the time they took interest in the photos she was planning to take?
It wasn't deliberate. It just kind of happened. After breakfast, she started to write down the first phrases and words that came to her mind: things her friends had said, witticisms she had read, song lyrics, nonsense. In total, 238 things had been written down. It was time to select 238 photos in which to photoshop the words onto - a random photo storybook. Her life, or at least how she wanted to romanticize it.
Waking up late with a bit of a cold, she was a little giddy that a day of laziness could be reasonably justified. She was quartering a red apple with great care when she became completely overwhelmed by the song on the radio - 'Music For A Found Harmonium' by Simon Jeffes. The joy and sadness of the song were so intertwined that she didn't know how to react. She was frozen. "Nothing I could ever do would be worth this song in trade," she thought to herself. "Maybe I should stop creating mediocre culture so that people could more easily find the good stuff."
Yet another Friday, another approaching weekend. She remembered Van Gogh's quote, "I seek to find a way to express the desperately swift passing away of things in modern life" and wondered exactly what 'things' he is referring to. Shifting back to her own life, her own living room, she reflected on the things swiftly passing by her. Out on her veranda, a squadron of dark birds are flying by. She takes several quick snapshots, even though she knows that this is not what Van Gogh was referring to.
Taking a taxi to Market Street Photo Supplies, she picked up the prints and 6x4.5 negatives that were hastily dropped off two weeks earlier. A light leak in the back of the camera has ruined each image with vertical red streaks. But they are beautiful and mysterious. She is reminded that accidents are not always a bad thing.
Talking long-distance on the phone with her brother in London, they both quickly realized that they didn't have much to talk about. She recalled the stupid games they used to play - in particular, the 'boring game'. On long car drives or flights, they would compete to see who could come up with the most boring ideas, poems, foods, people and TV shows. In retrospect, the game was actually quite interesting. As soon as she had hung up the phone she left her flat, camera in hand, in search of the most boring images possible, which would surely make for the most interesting photographs ever taken.
