Photos Suck

I've recently met a man with a photo fetish. He calls it a hobby. I call it a pain in the ass. Another friend of mine actually teaches photography at a local college and has asked me to help him out with a figure study...supidly, I said yes. First hurdle crossed, the next is to see if he can actually convince me to shed clothing and pose. But that being said, I have had a bit of a thought about photography in general.

I've always been photo phobic, both in front of and behind the camera. No logical explanation for it, really, but there it is. I used to proffer the excuse that it stole my soul, like some Native American tradition, in order to get out of the shutter's gaze. Then I discovered Ruth Bernhard and began to believe that photography really did capture someone's soul. I remember seeing a Weston exhibit years ago and being seduced by the undulations of peppers and the haunches of vegetation and falling madly in love with the play of shadow and light. And I envied the eyes that could see the world like that. Yesterday a book of Roy Stuart photography arrived in the mail and again, and as I perused the hyper sexual pages I again astonished at the myriad ways to look at the world.

If only I didn't have such an visceral reaction to the camera as apparatus...I remember a line from one of my favorite fiction books: John Le Carre's The Night Manager (I always wanted to be a spy...) where one character was snapping away and another turned to her and said "Can't we just *remember* this for fucking once?"...It resonated with me, as my memory seems so much more a generous editor to my life than does a camera.