I recently bought a new smart phone because I ran out of memory on my old one—a move that is akin to cluttering up one room and, instead of taking the time to clean, starting to fill up another bigger room.
As a parent in the digital era, I snap pictures like crazy. I send one image after another to my husband, documenting my day with the children in fragments that he can piece together remotely. Each image sent to him seems to stamp the moment with more value, and yet, ask me two days later what those snapshots were and why, and it’s likely I’ll just look at you with a blank stare before changing the subject.
While perusing through Mindful.org, I came across an article about the slow-photography movement—a mini-rebellion against the tendency to photograph every detail of every moment.
Author Tim Wu says, “Our cameras are so advanced that looking at what you are photographing has become strictly optional.” He says that the ability to document our surroundings without even seeing them causes us to lose “the experiential side, the joy of photography as an activity.” Wu’s notions got me thinking about my own documentation addiction, and then, subsequently, a very special plastic toy camera.
Our cameras are so advanced that looking at what you are photographing has become strictly optional.
Years ago, my daughter, Opal, who is now seven, played incessantly with a Fisher Price toy camera. It doesn’t take real pictures. The viewfinder has the perpetual image of a cartoon dog wearing a Hawaiian shirt and smiling into the blazing sun with a sailboat in the background. The camera is battery powered and when you push the purple button on top, a perky woman’s voice says, “SMILE!” followed by the faux-click of an old-fashioned instamatic.
When Opal was a pre-schooler, she went through a phase of shooting fake photos all over the place with her toy camera. She would line up the shot, as if framing an actual scene or portrait, and then hold up the camera for me to have a look. As we both gazed at the image of the cartoon dog (that looked increasingly psychedelic the more I looked), she’d say something like, “Look how high the bunny jumped in this one!”
Her grandma and grandpa bought her an actual camera for her birthday around that same time, a little digital thing that was about as basic and hardy as they come. The gift came from my recommendation—I thought that her interest in fake photography would translate to real photography. Not so.
For months, she chose her fake camera over the real one, time and time again.
On one particular afternoon during that time, we took a walk with our yellow lab, Elvis, to a nearby duck pond. It was a gorgeous day, with a slight breeze and plenty of shade to blanket our path. Opal was in a documenting mood. She brought along her fake camera and was on high alert for photo-worthy subjects. (I can recall them all now because I wrote them down in a frenzy on that very day.)
I experienced our walk on a deeper level than I ever had before—steeped in curiosity and noticing.
“Stop the stroller, mommy! I need to take a picture of this!” The yellow nub of a dandelion had squished onto the sidewalk through a crack in the cement. Click.
We continued. “Stop, mommy, look at those!” The field to our right was shrouded in tiny deep-purple flowers. Click.
She held the camera up, in the attempt to show me what she saw.
“Look, honey,” I said and pointed at another viney white wildflower that grew along the sidewalk like a border.
“No, mommy. I already have enough pictures of the white ones.”
It continued like this. Opal took fake photos of the cottonwood grove by the bridge, of Elvis walking right next to her stroller with ears flopped back in a state of contentment. She took a fake photo of the bunny that ran across our path and sent Elvis into a colossal tizzy. She took a fake photo of me picking up an especially goopy pile of dog poop in a plastic bag (and giggled all the while). She took a fake photo of the empty duck pond and of the dense moss that had seemingly swallowed all the ducks. Click. Click. Click.
This was a route Opal and I had walked dozens of times, but on that particular day, she decided that everything deserved a closer look. And, not surprisingly, I experienced our walk on a deeper level than I ever had before—steeped in curiosity and noticing.
As I was leaving for work later that day, doing my normal exiting rounds, I found myself thinking click as I scanned to make sure all the red lights on the stove were off, click as I dog-proofed by shutting the doors and putting all the food away. And as I was pulling out of my driveway, I was not plagued with my familiar, half-brained need to stop the car and run back in to re-check that the stove was off and that I hadn’t left a bar of dog-toxic chocolate on the counter.
Days later, I continued to carry around the images of nearly all the things we stopped to admire through the lens of her toy camera while on that walk. And yet, when I shot photos with my real camera, I often felt further away from my subject than before. As if the act of documenting had subcontracted the need for my thoughts to hold onto anything beyond the surface of the moment, if even that.
…when I shot photos with my rea