“It’s not much, but I thought you might like it,” my best friend said. I unwrapped the graduation gift, unearthing it from it’s home of brightly colored tissue paper enclosed by an equally brightly colored gift bag. A photo album. A photo album in which she had already put a few photos of the two of us; from prom, from her most recent birthday, and from our trip to Grand Junction. “I got you started, you fill in the rest.”
And, boy, did I ever. I decided to fill the album purely with pictures from my senior year, my best year so far. In every plastic-covered slot resided a photo from prom, graduation, Diamond Lake, swim meets, theatre productions--significant events with significant people. I wanted to keep these moments and these people with me as I began a new chapter in my life. That’s essentially what the prisoners in Plato’s cave are doing; only in their case, it’s by force. They know nothing but images put before them, shadows of what is real. I wanted to cling to the familiar shadows while reality came rushing in around me.
Probably the majority of my photo album is taken up by various road trips to Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Mount Rushmore, and California. We (the people I went on these trips with and myself) found it so crucial to bring cameras on each of these trips. In fact, on the senior trip to California, all five of us brought each of our own cameras, even though we promised to all share our photos in an online album as soon as we got home. Thus we had duplicate (quintuplet?) photos of the same things. It was ridiculous, really. Why was it so necessary that we had five times the number of pictures we already had? Because these photos served as proof “that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had.” We each had to prove it to our family, to our Facebook friends, and to ourselves once the trip was complete.
I also needed to have control of what got its picture taken and how the picture was taken on that trip. The same goes for any other occasion where a camera is deemed necessary). Being in control of a camera means being in “a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.” And besides, it’s in my genes as a half-Japanese individual. Sontag’s theory that “using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun,” is a stretch. To say that the stereotypically “workaholic” ethnicities require “a friendly imitation of work” at all times is small minded. By the classic standard, photography is not a productive thing. It just isn’t. The world would continue to revolve if there were no pictures. It would be a tragic world, but life would go on. I have felt the Asian need for perfection, and taking pictures is just the opposite. It’s therapeutic. For just that moment, it’s only you and the subject in the world. It’s all about creativity and artistry and not many Japanese workaholics are working for the sake of creativity and artistry. They’re working for success, honor and other people—not themselves and the subject.
If anything, the appeal of playing photographer for workaholic ethnicities may be that of achieving what all humans desire: immortality. Seeing an event is significantly different from seeing a photograph of it. Visual memories fade because, like movies and television, they move and shift--they change. Taking a photograph seals one millisecond forever in an “image-world that bids to outlast us all.” It is more difficult to recall every person, every detail, and every movement in a witnessed moment. But pictures are more concrete and can be viewed over and over again, thus committing them to memory. In fact, photos may be viewed so many times that we may begin to feel as though we were there, even if we weren’t. Take the famous Kent State Massacre photo. The Burning Monk. The soldiers lifting the American flag at Iwo Jima. The Execution of a Viet Cong Guerrilla. A viewer can feel himself or herself in the moment, smell the gunpowder, hear the screams, taste the disgust—but only thanks to imagination. Photos “are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy” for they can offer us the visual side of a moment, and that is all. The rest is up to us.
That’s not to say that photographs don’t move something real in us. Whether that is sympathy, anger, sadness, amusement, or nostalgia, pictures are a release of built up emotions in a modern and cutting-edge world where real connections are difficult to come by. This is why I ordered 200 pictures to fill my photo album with. What if I can’t connect with the people I meet at college? I know I can connect with the people in this album. The problem is, they’re only three inches tall. They’re shadows. If we blind ourselves to reality and stay in the cave, we won’t experience all the wonders that await us outside. We “linger unregenerately…in mere images of the truth” and that can keep us from exploring the actual truth.
Yet, photographs are proof. They hold evidence that the actual truth does indeed exist. I can look at these old shadows and see that I managed to find amazing people to share incredible experiences with. It makes me sad, it makes me homesick, but it gives me faith that I am on my way to finding more amazing people to share more incredible experiences with. I got my life started, I’ll fill in the rest.
No comments:
Post a Comment