I am not a camera, but there is a camera inside of me. The tool which safeguards precious moments is also a gatekeeper, a moderator. There is a camera inside of you too—monitoring your performance and producing what you see before you now. I want to break the relationship with my camera. Reorient our focus onto what really matters.
When I look in the mirror, I see a camera, and I wonder where the humanity has gone. I wonder what happened to simply being. Is it perseverance that fuels the obsession with preserving? Aren’t we all running from what we’d never want to photograph, the things that can’t be posted, streamed, or stored in pixels?
My camera is constantly putting tragedy and triumph on mundane pedestals. It captures everyone in costumes, acting like the camera, the portrait, or the film they think (perhaps rightly) that they’re in.
Let's go through reality without eyes, and the camera will still be there. Let's go through reality without ears or a mouth, and the microphone will still be there. There is something intangible that comes from objectifying an experience. This unprocessed artistic mechanic may be a barrier between this reality, and the next.
A wise friend recently said to me that curiosity is what consciousness has the potential be, and memories are what consciousness has been. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to the question of memory. What it is, what it costs, and the bargain I made in order to keep it all to myself and still share with the world.
Sometimes I worry that the true function of memory will be destroyed in an effort to produce more of it. How many reels have been created to just burn in our war of quantity over quality. Though, with every concern I raise, I must also raise a glass for each time a shutter closed or flash exposed and collected moments of those I love, but will never truly know.
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