methinks

A Photographer

This Sunday morning was like the rest.

He left his small rental house before dawn on foot wearing a pocketed vest that held one unopened roll of Kodachrome film, a 72mm polarizing filter and a gray card. From his right shoulder hung an empty second-hand Nikon 6006 fitted with a 35-70 zoom lens. Under the vest he wore an outfit that approximated something he saw a National Geographic photographer in India wearing, except his was clean and pressed and purchased at Wal-Mart. He wore Velcro shoes. Left hand in vest pocket, right hand resting on suspended camera, he walked the three blocks to the river, hoping to capture a magical fog-bridge-sunrise.

He believed a camera could capture truth unseen with a living eye, that an instant isolated from its event, frozen in silvery cellulose to be mulled and measured, would reveal a character of life hidden behind daily distractions, that in fully empathizing with the entirety of an instant, then perhaps one day he could, if only for an instant, empathize with all of entirety. Or at least he read something like that in a book once. He'd read quite a lot about photography in preparation for the day he'd find something to photograph.

Weekly he'd walk the streets of his Midwestern town, his rambling internal dialogue humming so trite and if only I had good Northern light and her face is so bland. He'd stroll the circuit every weekend never taking a picture. Saturday morning sunrises were so done and Sunday evening church crowds were contrived. Sunday morning bridges were blasé, or in his mind bla-say. It was either too cloudy or too sunny or the water wasn't still enough. When shafts of sunrise would penetrate the fog in that heavenly motif we've all seen, he'd refrain from wasting film on something so well documented. He was looking for a real moment, not a postcard.

At the bridge he began to talk:

There is some potential here if only the hues would intensify. That barge doesn't frame well with the diagonals in the bridge. It's a mismatch, always a mismatch. Vertical lines, horizontal lines. I'm looking for composure, symmetry, something like sincere harmony.

His ramblings brought a reply:

You gonna scare off the fish, complained a scrawny grandpa sitting on a bucket, blue jeans dark blue and too long, rolled a full turn at the bottom, white t-shirt white no more and stretched to fit his former frame.

I'm a photographer, he snorted and walked towards town to find the church crowds.