Camera Obscura

I've become too wrapped up in photography to write. It's strange. I recently received a new camera, a Sony a7, and it voraciously consumes all my free time, holding me hostage, taking long exposures with my amygdala. It even follows me into my dreams, where I have visions of snapping serene scenic shots and surreptitious up-skirts, pretty pussy panoramas. It is
a thing of obsession, pornography...I mean, photography. One of the lenses I'd purchased has an aperture of 1.2, which produces a dreamlike kind of bokeh; it smears light like oil paint.

I feel like a giant eyeball, rolling around hard pavement, stopping at times and staring, then stumbling onward like tumbleweed. When a camera is in my hands suddenly the world comes alive, and everything is fascinating. I see things in ways I normally wouldn't. Details, large and small; juxtapositions of objects; shadows and light; textures; colors, or their absence; symmetry and multiplicity. The world presses itself against my retina orgiastically, making lewd advances, talking dirty and wearing lingerie.

There is something lonely about photography, and a feeling of being lost. It is akin to hunting; foraging alone in a forest to find your reflection in something. You roam through streets and trails searching for the thing that speaks to you - that which conveys truth or meaning. You stalk it, survey it, capture it. Once apprehended, you clean it up and trim away excess, make it more ready for consumption. Time thwarts you always, stealing the sun from the horizon, sending the bird flying away, swaying a tree's branches or a flower's petal, dissolving a cloud. In a sense, photography is a means to document loss: the thing you photograph will never again be as it was in the moment you'd captured it. Taking a photo becomes an illusion of stealing back a moment from time. You look at the photo and relish in its memory and fool yourself into believing you are experiencing it as you once were. There is an almost unhealthy dwelling, an inability to let go. An absurd delusion.