Imperfect Lens
A Meditation on the Mechanics of Aesthetics (Day 65)
Over Christmas, Little Bean received a present of what is essentially a Polaroid camera. They don’t call it that. It’s packaged as basically a kid toy, pink and cute looking with some special lenses you can use. But, yeah, it’s a Polaroid, complete with a little film pack and a slot that spits out the picture and the image comes up slowly. You and I know what a Polaroid camera is.
But to Little Bean, it’s a thing of magic. She set about taking pictures of her friends, and she even managed to get a picture of me with the dog.
It’s such a bad picture, all blown out and grainy. She gave it to me to take to work. My daughter took a picture of me. I love it so much.
Anyway, she’s been running around with the thing and it brought to mind an essay I wrote to her, about her school picture day. This was 2019. What’s remarkable is how meaningful the piece remains, five years later.
I present it to you all today. After, go and take a picture of something neat and send it over so we can see it! Enjoy!
Imperfect Lens
Can I be present in a moment, and document it at the same time? Is that moment of esthetic revelation – that split second when an image, or landscape, or child moves you to reach for your camera – even a real epiphany?
After all, the first time I laid eyes on the Grand Canyon, I cried. No photo exists of that soul movement. Sitting in a rocking chair with you, baby, that first time, a defining turning point, the instant of my shedding the trappings of my old life and becoming a dad – no picture of that.
Being present must exist only in the slip stream of time and absent of anything but awe. Capturing that awe seems, what, like cheating time.
Or does it?
The photographer Danielle Hark talks about photography as being able to capture the outside world with the light of your inner world. In other words, the more tuned in to your inside – to who you are, your place in the cosmos, your inner eye – then the more stories your photos can convey.
“If you’re sad, you don’t need to photograph someone crying to convey that emotion or story,” she writes. “You just need to view the world as you. A macro photo of a single drop of dew can convey a narrative of agonizing sadness, or delight and joy, if you let it.”
If you let it.
Look what that school photographer “let” in. For the fourth year in a row, baby, you’ve owned that cheap stool in front of that bland, dark green sheet. You’ve walked straight up and claimed that moment
I wonder – does a pre-school photographer set out to capture the moment, do they seek awe? Do they cry when they get home, not from exhaustion but from the day long torrent of conducting children’s emotions; from those that wail, to those that frown, to those, like you, that beam like the sun.
What a job, to try to make every three-year-old smile. Or… or, to capture the authenticity of a frown. Are school pictures even real, do they convey the authentic child?
Well, if style is about the mechanics of a photo and aesthetics is about how the photo makes the viewer feel, then that certainly explains all three angles of your annual sitting; the photographer’s noise free, grounded setting, your explosion of charm and my melancholy of seeing how lovely, and how adult you are becoming. Style. Subject. Reaction. Really, the recipe for art, generally.
I recall a particular episode – perhaps third or fourth grade - of my own series of annual walks to the gym photographer. I’m wearing a light blue zipper cardigan with white lines, and a dark brown, wide-collared shirt. My teeth are half missing and I have a cowlick that sticks straight up from the top of my head. The background was a farm scene (how puzzling is that?) and we leaned casually on a plastic fence. I folded my hands together at the top post. What a mess it all was.
The aesthetics of such a combination are so deeply buried, it’s a wonder the picture makes me feel anything but confused. Not ashamed though, baby, because imperfection, it seems to me, goes hand in hand with mindfulness.
Jonathan Foust, a world-renowned meditation instructor and free-lance photographer talks a lot about what he calls “finding the middle,” that fine line between experiencing awe and actually taking a picture of it. Capturing awe and experiencing it at the same time. And that moment, more often than not, arrives at the moment the photographer, and the photographer’s subject, stops striving for perfection.
In fact, Foust says, “taking pictures is a sort of perpetual training in the art of imperfection.”
By that standard, we have arrived at perfection. And I know it’s perfection, because your hair is a bit jangled, and your hair bands are different colors and maybe you should have worn a brighter color – but all that imperfection makes you, you.
Because I know your hair is mussed because you played hard on the playground. And you picked those barrettes. And you don’t care. And I don’t care. And that photographer likely didn’t even have to ask you to smile, because somehow that’s just your vibe.
The light shines on you and you shine right back. The moment is by design and by accident, a trifle and steeped with meaning. And in the end, you move on, another child takes your seat and the imperfect you – now a fridge magnet – lives on, another chapter in your yearly, impossible, impermanent moment of grace.
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