PSYCHOSCAPES: What's in a Picture

Taking pictures has been part of my life since I was a teenager. I have included a photo, deteriorated by age, that I took in Vietnam when I was nineteen. The scene looks so peaceful and pastoral it is difficult to believe a war is raging nearby. One might wonder why I reached for my camera at that moment.

James Agee, novelist and poet, believed that the camera was 'the central instrument' of his age.' He believed photography could transmit, as no other art could, "the peculiar kinds of poetic vitality which blaze in every real thing.”^⁠1 Dorothea Lange, the renowned documentary photographer, often said, "The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera,”^⁠2

These two leading lights would have understood why I took that picture. Unfortunately, their high expectations for the camera have become marginalized and diluted over time.

In her classic treatise, "On Photography," Susan Sontag^⁠3 complained that taking photos could be too much of a good thing – and for the wrong reasons. "It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing." Indeed, high-tech devices like the iPhone have undoubtedly led to overkill.

Margaret Renkl, the superb essayist, is spot on in railing against such excess: “The ordinary world would take our breath away if only we paused our podcasts, took our earbuds out and listened to the wind in the pines.”^⁠4 She advises us to stop substituting the physical act of taking a photo for the thrill of experiencing the grandeur of our surroundings.

I admit to taking a horde of thoughtless pictures when I started out, despite the long hours it took to develop my work in the darkroom. Against all conventional logic, now that technology has made shooting countless images effortless, I take far fewer. No longer am I attempting to capture the moment but looking, instead, for the essence.

However, even when I was young, I could occasionally rise to the occasion. I took this photo shortly after dawn, about to embark on my first river mission in Vietnam. Soon, we would be at battle stations, and I would be manning a 50-caliber machine gun.

Capturing a pretty sunrise was the furthest thing from my mind when I snapped this photo. Instead, I was attempting to steady my nerves. By looking through the viewfinder, I was connecting to a deeper reality that encompassed Mother Nature and the soothing rhythms of everyday life in the form of the two ships, one small and one large, tied together, going about their mundane, peacetime duties.

Merely snapping the shutter doesn't enlighten us about what we see: we must attend deeply to what we view. It's similar to how we only get to know someone by deep listening, not self-centered talk.

My conclusion is that despite our many high-tech gadgets, we can only perceive what's real through our physical eyes and human heart. Luckily for us, our human senses are magical!

As the great visionary William Blake has written, if we look deeply enough, everything will become visible: We will then be able to see "a World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower" And" 'hold Infinity in the palm of your hand."

xxx

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