I was preparing to take a photograph of some attractive buildings in a French village when a little girl popped out of her doorway and asked: “Why are you doing that?” in excellent French, considering how young she was. I had no ready answer, in that or any other language, but it was an interesting question. Why was I doing that? She may not have understood that I was simply taking a picture. My big, old, black camera looks more like a death ray machine than the colorful toy-like cameras she grew up with. But either way she had, like any child, gone straight to the heart of the matter.
Why do we photograph perfectly ordinary places and things? Before photography came along artists would sketch and paint the scenes they saw on their travels to show to people who had never been there. But now everybody has been there, and taken their own pictures, and there are billions more pictures in books and on the web, so what’s the point?
I could claim, but I won’t, that I was photographing this village scene for artistic reasons. That particular corner has an attractive combination of colors, textures, curves and angles that makes it visually appealing. But nobody has ever accused me of having “artistic reasons” for anything.
So, why was I doing that? My camera is too heavy to hold at arm’s length, so I don’t take selfies and in any case I know what I look like. On the other hand I have always regarded a camera as a portable memory. We have the old-fashioned habit of keeping a photograph album, which is now such an archaic object that it has become the subject of one of those nostalgic documentaries on public television. We have a library of albums as big as medieval Bibles, in which our memories are carefully preserved. The pictures have scarcely changed over the years. The main actors get a little older and grayer, but the prints are so small and fuzzy that it scarcely matters. Photograph albums give a reassuring sense of time standing still. Unlike a smart phone they also keep your false memories safe for decades and decades.
In a photograph album the great world is reduced to a manageable size. At 4” x 6”, every place looks pretty much like every other. The labels are missing from many of our older pictures. Here are some impressive but unknown ruins, which might be in Greece or Detroit, unsteady portraits of parties and party animals long forgotten, picturesque country scenes that could be anywhere. These mystery pictures have a special charm. They allow the imagination to work.
So was I taking this photograph for the family album? Not really, we have several pictures of the same place already. The girl was waiting for an answer to her question, her little arms folded in the classic pose of exasperated impatience. When we are very young I suppose we do imagine that grownups know what they are doing and why. It’s only later that the awful realization dawns on us that grownups have no idea. They are just pretending, improvising from minute to minute.
“I’m not really sure” I said feebly. She stared at me with contempt, and vanished back into the house, confirmed in her opinion that all foreigners are stupid. When I consider her still-unanswered question, I fear she may be right.
Copyright: David Bouchier
