Inevitably, the Unexpected Will Be Nudged

Letter to a Stranger

On my desk, my old camera newly strapped by Søren

The light pouring into my studio this morning is perfect. Morning muted, snow muted, luminous. This is the kind of day I want to or used to want to make photographs in, as an old photographer friend used to say. He was a mysterious round man with a round face and round glasses who always disappeared and reappeared. I’ve not seen him in a long time. The last time was accidental and on Walter’s birthday. The friend was ill and had gone out into the cold night in search of local honey. When he learned it was Walter’s birthday, he gifted the honey to him. We tried to refuse, but he insisted. This was before the pandemic, when being sick in public was normal. When running into a friend on the street was normal. I’d never seen him in anything other than black pants, black shirt, round glasses, and red socks. I went with him once, or more than once, to the sock man in New York City, where he had been buying his red socks for years. And always a camera. What kind of camera? Ah, as I move through the memory, I know it was a Canon, when only moments ago, when I wrote this as a letter, I did not know what kind of camera he carried. He tried to convince me to switch. I am finally convinced, so many years later, but paralyzed with options.

His finger was always on the trigger and the shutter and aperature were always opening and closing. That delicious small sound of an old film camera. Snap. He managed to seat himself at Helmut and June Newton’s dinner table once.

Life so quickly rivers into new realities. Do dark photography dinners with strangers sill exist, or is all bright light and dependent upon our own individualness, our own screens and solitudes?

If I do use the light this morning, it will be for a letter (I did!) The letter from which I am writing this. And for sewing another Dream Journal, and digitally documenting for the obsessive ongoing nature of onlining. I will not yet make a photograph with my old camera, my old friend, who always accompanied me. Who bruised me with its weight, whose shutter clunk was the sound of me being. Making a photograph requires so much more than what I’ve been doing with my image capturers for a long time now. This obsessive documenting of everything. WhoTF cares? For now, I take a photograph of the camera seeing.

I long for something accidental and unexpected — something riskier.

I don’t know what I am, or what I ever was. I never did have a name for it. There are just so many ways to see the world. Inevitably, the unexpected will be nudged.

Camera now, camera then