Pictures of Pictures

Yesterday, I wrote this:

…writing about writing, blogging about blogging, making movies about movies, in general doing art about art is so limited and limiting. Like all narcissism and narcissists, it is a frightful bore. It is not reflective of a world view that looks outward, in wonder.

Then, I wrote this:

As I wrote those words, there flashed in my mind an old photograph of my mother holding me as an infant. She has her back the the camera, but she is looking over her shoulder, grinning, as I try to climb over her shoulder. I am staring at the viewer with big, baby eyes.

But what I was really doing was trying to get at the camera my father was holding. He was a great photographer. He always had a camera, and he was always taking pictures. It was a part of my life to be photographed all the time. Later, I would learn to just ignore the camera and talk through the camera to him. Looking at these old photos, I never remember the scene as the camera showed it, I remember my dad with a camera. I remember what the scene looked like from the other direction.

My father had a lot of cameras, possibly hundreds. Sometimes, he would let me handle them. They were fascinating devices. What child could resist?

He would give me these old, useless, broken cameras, and he had many of those too. One in particular I remember was a Kodak "Brownie." This does not actually date me. It had belonged to my grandfather when he was boy, and it was old then. They were a kind of recyclable disposable camera. They came loaded with film, and when it was full, you took it in, and they would develop the roll and give you back the camera with new film. In my time, and my father's time, no one handled that old model any more. My father explained that this camera had a "leak."

"A leak?"

"Yes. It has a crack. Light leaks in. It spoils the film."

Light. Leaking. Wow.

As I understand it, there were several evolutions in the design of the Brownie, and later ones had user loadable 120 film, but mine was the oldest kind. One could not open it. It took, as my father said, "special tools and a darkroom."

But happily, I went around "taking pictures" with it. It had the tiniest viewfinder. One had to hold it just so simply to see through it. But it would make a satisfying click, and it had a neat ratchet sound it made when you wound the film. I took very good care of that camera. I knew I was being tested. I had to prove I could take care of things before I would be trusted with better things.

I would "take a picture," and then go to the drugstore to have it "processed." I would give the developer instructions I had heard my dad say, like, "Push it two stops." He told me that made dark pictures lighter. I wanted bright photos.

Then, while it was being processed at the imaginary drugstore, I would take cut up squares of paper, and draw the photos I saw in my imagination. I used a pencil. The gray tones were more photo-like than my crayons. The world was in color; the pictures were in black and white. The world was bright and huge; it was heavy, solid, hot, or cold; when you turned a corner, there was always something there. The pictures were thin and tiny, feather-light and always just a little bit cool; when you flipped them over, they were always the same.

But sometimes, those weak, thin, facsimiles could be so very beautiful. They were not reflections of reality; they were their own reality.

It may strain your credibility to think that a very young child may have wondered what was real and what was not real and to ponder the overlap between them, but I did, and probably you did too.

Today, After re-writing the above, a little, I wrote this:

Writing is like that also. It is so impoverished and massless. It is amazing that we can even recognize reality in it at all.