[Leica] long and largely OT: some commentary on Kyle's Lessons

["Dan Honemann" <ddh@home.com>]

Just wanted to comment on a couple of things that caught my attention in
Kyle's essay.

First, I had to laugh--in empathy--at this passage on equipment:

"Sometime early on in the year I realized that I really didn't care about
cameras as much as I thought I had in the past. Sure, I'd still flip to the
back of the book to see what kind of camera Nan Golden was using but I was
suddenly uninterested in collecting weird camera parts."

When I see an image that is beautiful and captivating, my tendency is to
want to know everything about how the person made it and do that myself.
It's really a form of sincere appreciation at root, a desire to participate
in something so creative and inspiring, but the end effect all too often is
that I focus entirely on the equipment.  The secret hope is that if I just
get the same camera and the same lens then I will get the same results.

The impetus behind this fantasy is clear: equipment can be bought--it's
readily attainable--while creative talent cannot.  That's because the
creative process isn't objective; it comes from the heart, not the wallet
nor--though many may argue--the mind.  Either the eye sees or it doesn't.
There is no contriving _vision_, after all: it eludes our best efforts to
manufacture it by thought, volition, or technique.

What makes the moment decisive is not a decision: it can't be learned, and
it most certainly can't be bought.  It's entirely choiceless, spontaneous
and, above all else, _playful_.  This is the sense I get when looking at
Kyle's 52 photos, and it's a revelation.  They evoke a sense of wonder and
curiosity that's just plain _fun_--a kind of joy I knew so well as a kid but
mostly since forgotten.

Now the inability to muster up this playfulness and creativity by sheer
force of will simply drives the command center I call "me" nuts.  I want to
figure it out, research all the components (can you say bokeh, anyone?),
decipher the mystery and bundle it up in a package I can order off the
internet.

Kyle's photography reminds me of something that my manic mind so often
overlooks: it's not only futile to attempt to figure out art--it's
unnecessary!  I don't have to discover the right camera and the perfect lens
to _see_: that happens automatically, effortlessly, I know not how or why.
But I reckon that if there is any one component that is crucial to the
process of capturing beauty in image, it is just this seeing.  No equipment
will substitute for that, and none can truly hinder it.  We all know that
art can be made with a Holga or an oatmeal box with a pinhole.

After a full year of reading photo.net, rec.equipment.photo.35mm, the LUG,
the LEG, and more magazines and books that I care to mention, I've come to
discover that _I_ am the perfect camera I've been looking for.  Not the
small, peevish I that wants to conquer the photographic universe--he's still
obsessed with finding which lens makes the best bokeh--but the I that
notices that madness and has a good laugh about it, the same I that sees
these words sprawling across the monitor and recognizes what they're
pointing at.

Which brings me to the other part of Kyle's essay I wanted to mention: this
business about wanting to re-invent the self.  Maybe the problem isn't that
we've got the wrong self--whatever that can possibly mean (and we're
conditioned almost from birth to believe it)--a condition that, if it were
true, we surely would have managed to remedy by now; maybe the problem is
that we identify with a self at all.  Who is it that sees the self, judges
it, and attempts to re-invent it?

It's as though we take the whole of life and confine it to a separate,
bumbling little entity trapped inside a bag of skin, call it me, and
naturally wind up feeling fragmented and broken as a result.  Little wonder
we want to fix it.

What I love so much about great photographs--as with any art--is their
potent reminder that we are already whole, just as we are, and so there's
nothing really that needs to be fixed or altered or improved.  Here there
is, for a moment at least, the joy of seeing for its own sake--uncontained,
unbounded, and completely uncontrollable.  I can hear Garry Winogrand say in
each one of his photographs: THIS is the way it is!  Not the way it
_was_--not what was photographed, nor the photographer, nor the
equipment--but the seeing that's happening right now, in the only decisive
moment there is: this one!

I'm not going to give up my quest for the perfect camera in the
meantime--it's too much fun chasing after that holy grail.  But it's helpful
to recognize that the  real camera is not contained in a black (or chrome)
box that costs too much and has a bad habit of going out of alignment.

Thanks, Kyle, for helping me to see that.

Regards,
Dan