I Had a Goal

I had a goal for where this post would go, but I haven't followed one little bit of it.

I'm very much enjoying the videos over at Ill Doctrine, a media/cultural/political vlog from a hip-hop background. The political commentary is decent, it's delivered in short, to the point, simple videos of a guy talking to a camera, but the guy is something of a hip-hop artist who's skill with words makes the whole thing worth it. On the media end of the spectrum, I found the idea in this video compelling. The idea is that we are so focused on creating media and documenting our lives that we lose focus on the events themselves. We're so focused on taking facebook pictures at x historical site that we don't stop to take the time to revel in the moment and just be. I saw the very paragon of this idea on my recent trip to Israel, where I took around 1600 pictures in the space of a month and a half, and the total number of pictures taken by the 300-odd participants in the program probably numbers somewhere in the 40,000s, if not more. Everyone - and I do mean everyone - appeared to me to be more concerned with how the pictures would make them look on facebook, more concerned with telling people what an incredible, moving experience they had at the Kotel, the Western Wall, the most holy site in modern Judaism, instead of experiencing those overwhelming emotions that flooded me as no other flood of emotions ever has because I didn't expect a drop of it, more concerned with the social theater of telling your friends why your summer was better than theirs, than they were concerned with staring history in the face, confronting the past as only a site like the Kotel can, and wrestling with who they are as a Jew and as a person. Why even go to a historical site, if you're only going to take a picture and brag to your friends? What does that say about a person's priorities, if the picture means more to them than the visit? 

Sure there's something to be said for the practice of photography, and photography is something I happen to very much enjoy. It can capture a specific moment much more truthfully than a painting ever could, and with the advent of cheap digital cameras, it seems like everyone's into photography. I have to ask though: when does taking pictures of your friends stop and portrait photography start? Last weekend I saw a book purporting to be a book of Allen Ginsberg's photography, and when I opened it up, what should I find but pictures Mr. Ginsberg took of his friends having fun. Then one day Mr. Ginsberg and his friends got famous, and those pictures went from being a memento from an enjoyable afternoon when Misters Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Williams hung out and smoked weed in somebody's apartment, to reputable photography published by a reputable publisher of photography books and sold in a bookstore owned by a respectable university. Sure there are some lines you could draw - staged portraits, photos taken "like a real photographer would," whatever that means, or whatever you like - but eventually there's got to be a line. When does the picture that I took of John sitting on a low wall talking to Matthew about what Luke and Mark said last night become something someone else would *ahem* pay me for the right to hang on the wall of their dining room in their 4 bedroom house in an affluent suburb?

It is for this reason that I am interested in a film camera. A film camera would make me consider every picture before take it, lest I waste a shot- an impossibility with a digital camera. 

Or maybe I'll just not take my shitty old point-and-shoot with me on any more vacations because it's distracting me from the matter at hand? I hate that camera anyway.