Month: July 2007

I’ve noticed an odd trend lately: most of the people I know who aren’t geeky in any way (aren’t technically inclined, aren’t particularly curious about how things work, and, not wanting to be bothered with technical details, tend to favor point-and-shoot or fully automatic cameras) seem to be really into classifying things. When some of my not-so-geeky friends see a pretty flower or bug, hears a bird song, or whatever, the first thing they do is try to figure out what it "is" (what it’s called, what family it’s in, if it’s native or invasive, etc.). Whereas I think most people would say I’m really geeky in my general approach to life, and I couldn’t possibly care less; to me it’s just a pretty flower, and thinking about classifying it actually interferes with my enjoyment of it. And this seems to be generally true of the geekier people I know, the computer programmers, the food science-inclined cooks, the web site builders… I’m not saying one way is better than the other, but I am more than a little surprised it’s not the other way around.

I, and many of the geeks I know, seem to have low latent inhibition in certain areas. When I look at a lens, I don’t see a single round thing, I see all the elements, the shutter mechanism, the raw materials being mined, processed, and delivered to the factory, the glass being formulated, the lens designer sitting in front of their computer weighing the trade-offs between manufacturing cost & difficulty, size, weight, available materials, and optical quality, and wonder what sort of person they are, if they’re happy, and what they had for breakfast. When I see something I know nothing about, my brain has a much harder time falling down all these rabbit holes at once. Yes, when I look at a pretty flower, it can chew on photosynthesis and cellular reproduction and thigmotropism and all that, but these sorts of natural phenomena get to the "and this is where the magic happens" end of the trail of my real comprehension much more quickly. And when that occurs, when I’m really there with it in the present rather than untangling the hair of its past, I can see the pretty flower for what I believe it to really be: nothing short of a fucking miracle.

And that, of course, completely changes how I’m inclined and able to photograph things. I’m out of the rigidity of literalism and into mystery and—dare I use this awful, wanktastic word—wonder, and there’s a lot more room for personal impression and interpretation to come through—at least there is for me—and those impressions and interpretations are of course vastly different, too. (Again, it’s not a matter of better or worse, just difference.)

I haven’t completely thought this out, I’m just typing through it, but it seems like this ties into the wide vs. deep thing (how your familiarity with a place affects the photographs you make in it) that Colin Jago and Paul Butzi have talked about. I’m not sure how, maybe it’s another kind of wide and deep, or maybe it’s a different axis altogether. I don’t know.