On Not Carrying a Camera – Cultivating memories instead of snapshots

Summary

Last summer, in Greensboro, North Carolina, at a retrospective exhibition of my work, a photographer introduced himself and asked a question no one had ever asked me. I assumed he was a photographer because he carried a camera bag, its pockets bulging with lenses. I thought he might ask if I preferred using a digital or a film camera, or if I preferred color to black-and-white film. But no, his question was different. He said he’d noticed that out of a hundred plus photographs in the exhibit, only one was titled “Chapel Hill.” “There must have been others, right? You’re from Chapel Hill.” I told him that I seldom photographed in Chapel Hill. “But why?” he asked. I said, “Because I live there. I can’t do two things at once.” I think he laughed. At least I hope he did, because I didn’t intend to be rude. But I was serious. I don’t carry a camera in my hometown of Chapel Hill, and even though my cellphone contains a camera, I use it only for snapshots. Naturally, there were moments when I wished I had a camera with me. Once, while walking in my neighborhood at twilight, I felt a strange rush of energy in the air, and, suddenly, no more than twenty feet away, a majestically antlered whitetail buck soared over a garden fence and hurtled down the dimming street. Yet even as it was happening—this unexpectedly preternatural moment—I tried to imagine it as a photograph. That’s how we’ve been taught to think. “Oh, I wish I’d had a camera!” But that presumes I would have been prepared to capture the moment—instead of being startled by it. Yet being startled by beauty is a uniquely, and all too rare, human gift. The photograph comes later, when I journey back from astonishment and begin to fiddle with my camera. Well, I don’t carry a camera in town, and here’s the reason: In 1972, on the day my son was born, I was in the hospital room with my wife Susan, trying to be of assistance. I was there to remind her of certain breathing patterns we’d learned in our natural-childbirth cl...