Reflection vs Representation
I don’t suppose it’s entirely an either/or situation, or that the two are mutually exclusive, but lately it seems I write more to elucidate the photographs I shoot than to meditate on life here on the other side of the world. This comes as something of a surprise to me, as I’ve never been a particularly good photographer. Jim and I have a great boxful of photos and snapshots from nearly three decades together, many of them overexposed, out of focus, poorly composed, or simply unrecognizeable to anyone who wasn’t on the spot (and, after a number of years, not even to those of us who did happen to be there at the time).
When I began writing these bulletins from this faraway place, I included photos only as necessary for the sake of illustration. Early on I wrote to a friend, “If my words needed pictures, I wouldn’t be much of a writer.” As the ratio of images to words has increased, my impetus for writing has shifted from the internal to the external; the source of my inspiration seems less insight than sight. I am not entirely happy about this, and I couldn’t tell you exactly why, but somehow I seem fundamentally to value reflection over representation. The more photos I use, the less writerly I feel.
Perhaps because my last few posts recounted excursions to local sites of interest, it seemed natural to amplify the words with pictures. I enjoy sharing our travels with you, and photos can be a more efficient medium there. But lately when I think about sitting down to write, the photos I shot on our recent trip to Jerusalem and on visits to two different regions of Georgia are a goad, a gauntlet I must run before another weekend comes along, producing a fresh batch of images that demand to be downloaded, edited, captioned, explicated. Meanwhile, what becomes of the writing voice I promised myself to develop by recording and reflecting on all the strange and wonderful experiences of being at home in Georgia? Does the voice become a voice-over, a mere adjunct to the images?
On the other hand, one reason for the great boxful of bad photos is that I’ve always thought I should be able to make good ones. I consider myself to be visually oriented, possessing an innate awareness of composition, color, light and shadow, as well as the odd or intriguing sights that attract a consciously open eye. So it has been a disappointment, time after time, to open an envelope of freshly developed film and find that I failed once again to capture what I saw through the view finder. Frustration with my inability to produce compelling, telling images led me to abandon the camera altogether for many years. I said I didn’t like taking photos because it meant stepping outside the immediate experience of new surroundings, but I resented equally the disparity between the fascinating sights I had seen in three dimensions and the unsatisfactory, two-dimensional images I produced.
What a happy surprise, then, to find that I can make decent photographs! (And thank you, digital photography, for the ability to shoot multiple views and choose the best one to represent my experience.) Dilemma resolved, right? Embrace a new medium and make a happy marriage of the two—words and pictures! Still, something about it doesn’t sit right with me. I think it has to do with the way I think about writing, what I expect from it and from myself as a writer. I aspire to communicate precisely and viscerally, to choose so exactly the right words that readers will share my experience, even recognize it as their own. Given those parameters, photographic accompaniment seems like a cheat, a short-cut through the proverbial thousand words. Hence my judgement that words in need of pictures must not be very effective or well-chosen.
Which brings me back, 700 words later, to the question that launched this soliloquy: do I write to reflect on my experiences and observations or to represent the photos I make? Ideally I’d prefer to illustrate this expat life in words alone, but would I deny the pleasure of employing a visual medium—especially one I’ve coveted—out of some stubborn notion about purity of expression?
If you have stuck with me through this argument with myself I thank you, and close with one photo, perhaps worth more than all these words.
