How did I go so long without reading First Things? It’s my favorite thing to read, period. Here’s a neat observation in the middle of an article on image and sacrament:
What is it that puts me off about photographers? Anyone who’s ever been in charge of taking pictures at a Thanksgiving dinner or a children’s birthday party knows how abstracting it is. If you have to take the pictures, you can’t be there in the usual sense: you have to be always looking for shots, turning people toward the camera, eyeing the turkey or birthday cake for posterity. But the more you believe in what you’re doing, the more you also believe your presence justifies everything.The photographers I’m talking about, the true believers, don’t seem absent from where they are, the way people do when their eyes pass over you as they talk on their cell phones. But as Nikon says on its website: “Choose a camera and you’ve taken the first step toward turning fleeting moments into precious memories.” What it says is accurate: the objective of most amateur photography is the conquest of time and distance. The photographs will eventually be the memories as the context drops away. Just go through your old photographs and see.
The great faculty of memory that St. Augustine celebrates in the Confessions has enhanced itself with literal accuracy and indentured itself to technology at the same time. Plato (and not just Plato) worried that even writing things down would supplant the living presence of the truth, but the photograph uncannily holds the present, only the present, this moment forever, while the world goes on.
A veiled Muslim woman once chased my wife through Istanbul trying to get back her stolen image. I understand the impulse. I find myself uncomfortably in the camp of Susan Sontag: “the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.”
susan sontag. ha.