Evening view of fountain in 5th district of Paris. Digital photo by Eric Francis. Words to Picturesby Eric FrancisGETTING A DIGITAL CAMERA changed my life. I don’t know what I waited for, but I didn’t go for it until earlier this year. What my camera taught me first was that I had spent most of 21 years sitting in front of a computer. Suddenly I had a reason to go outside and look at things. Yes, I needed a reason, I admit it. But at least I found one. I have always loved photography, though as a news and environmental reporter, most of what I took pictures of were things like people speaking at press conferences. Even if you’re photographing Zack de la Rosa in the press room of the Meadowlands Sports Complex, that is only so exciting. In New Paltz, I became a specialist in men in environmental suits and spools of wire. Of the two, the spools of wire (in the early 1990s, outside PCB-contaminated Scudder Hall on the SUNY New Paltz campus) are more firmly impressed in my mind, as if I memorized them when I photographed them. I look at those memories like tarot cards. Why did they need to pull miles of wire out of the walls of that building? These were the kinds of things I photographed. Then in 1999, my SLR film camera was destroyed in a flood. Cameras are easy to get, but I didn’t bond with any of the ones that I replaced it with. And I was becoming very concerned about the environmental impact of the film, paper, and chemicals associated with photography. The whole process is extremely expensive, messy and takes up a lot of space. Seeing all the dead fish floating in the lake outside the Kodak plant in Rochester is still impressed in my mind. So, too, is flushing gallons of darkroom chemicals down the toilet. These things definitely got in my way. Plus I always wanted to do things with photography that I could not afford, like make a lot of enlargements or do color darkroom work, which is expensive and tricky. The result was that I never used a camera just for pleasure until my digital. Yes, I took some photos on various trips and vacations, but something bothered me about it. Rolls of film would collect in my house. Slides would never make it to prints. It got to the point where I might as well have walked around without film in the camera. I am certain that my guilt complex or creative block (same idea) was allayed by the fact that suddenly I could put 250 photos on a chip the size of a quarter, download them to my Macintosh for free, and go out and do it again. This cured me. So did rechargeable batteries, which I bought a lot of -- and as a result, promptly put into everything I own that uses AA cells, which cured me of another environmental guilt complex. A set of very good rechargeable batteries costs about 10 times more than the ones you throw away, and lasts at least 1,000 times longer. I began to visualize how many pallets of batteries I was saving with my five little sets of rechargeables. Everybody knows this. I did. For some reason I had ignored it. Now I cannot believe that non-rechargeable batteries are even legal. And finally, I could ignore the huge debate between which last longer -- Duracells or Energizers. (In digital cameras, they last about 10 minutes and are useless.) Freed from film, developing, paper, plastic packaging and batteries, suddenly I was going out on photo missions twice a day. I started exploring my neighborhood at midnight, visiting Ile St. Louis at odd hours, and paying attention to fruit stands. I started hanging out by the fountain at Place Maubert studying the way the light refracted in the water, and waiting for passers-by to stroll along behind it. Like a lot of artists in Paris before me, I became curious about the way light reflected off of two buildings in my neighborhood, the Pantheon and Notre Dame Cathedral. I became curious about a lot of things I would never have considered, like paving stones and escalators. I took a lot of pictures. I didn’t plan what to photograph, I just took my camera everywhere, walked around and photographed anything that looked interesting. Then I began studying the results, scrolling through iPhoto. Looking at my pictures told me something about how I see the world. One thing I noticed right away was that there are always multiple layers in my pictures. There always seems to be one world leading into another and another, like I’m gazing through a threshold all the time. I also noticed my fascination for geometry. As an astrologer, I swim in geometry, but it’s pretty abstract; an astrological aspect is, from our viewpoint on Earth, usually a figment of the mind. Another thing I noticed is that I like to play with reflections. Paris has a lot of mirrors, and there are windows everywhere. My pictures often explore the layered window-mirror reflection theme. After I saw a few hundred of these, I recognized that this has something in common with the way I see the world, something I was not aware of before seeing it illustrated. I noticed I am always looking through things, looking past the surface of the world for something else. I also noticed I’m fascinated by context. I noticed the way I would see people; all my pictures of people seem to be explorations of the way they experience their environment. The cafes in Paris are very good for this because they all have huge windows, and you can set up your camera on a table and look at the world closely. I discovered how much fun it is to photograph important monuments from a few blocks away, partly blocked by other buildings. Photography grants a kind of poetic entitlement to look and to see. Until I started looking at empty chairs and tables in cafes, I didn't realize how much narrative they contain. Then one day I noticed that my pictures are different than any I’ve ever seen. I noticed, in effect, that I really do see the world my own way. Before my digital camera exploration, I never noticed my fascination with light. I never knew I could see so much of the stuff. It seems like wherever I look, there is light, and it seems to speak to me. Photography is about nothing but light, on one level, but to really photograph light for its own sake is a lot of fun. I won't get into my fascination for photographing the French police, but that's turned into a sub-hobby of its own. It's a cousin of news photography, true, but for some reason in France it feels more like art. But I think the most important thing that happened was that I began to find phases of time when I was freed from language and ideas. I felt, more than anything, liberated from the burden of having to make sense. Making sense is a terrible weight that writers are placed under, even the ones whose work is primarily creative, not journalistic. Even if you have nothing to prove, it’s necessary to consider the worldview of your readers and editors, spell everything right, make sure that the paragraphs work, keep the facts straight, and be conscious of tone. Writing is an active construction. Photography can be more passive; it can observe; it is not right or wrong. Where language enters the picture, is a powerful drive, both conscious and unconscious, to be right. Once the work is published, writing is subject to intellectual analysis and is therefore, in someone’s mind, going to be wrong. There is a mental craft to not caring what people think about your writing (including editors and agents), but crafts take effort and that is not a particularly creative use of time. And most writing involves an explanation. Explaining anything takes a lot of effort and one must adapt to those to whom we are doing the explaining. I don't care how enlightened we are: when we say something, we want to be understood, even if we're not believed. This is challenging in the world of feelings. What I found, with my photographs, was that I was suddenly freed from explaining how I feel. Without recognizing what I was doing at first, I began to present to the world examples of the real thing. These may have been my first experiences of conveying feeling without first processing it through the filter of an idea. I seem to have a lot of feelings, and I do need to express them. I think I've always tried to do this through my writing. Taking pictures is a lot easier. And for sure, I need something easy.++ |