Air Jordans and vapes and lost fish. Get going or cut bait. Bait for bait. Waiting with baited breath. Move. Unzip the NYA-EVO, retrieve the long glass. Reverse the hood and snap it into place. The short lens slung around my torso. Light is fading fast. I have minutes. The jetty is loaded. A seventy-year-old French woman and her daughter, young Mainers, and a rainbow of foreign tourists. India, Vietnam, China, and Canada. “Is this going to be in a magazine?” someone asks. “Are you here to take pictures so you can send them to us?” a truly clueless father asks as I walk by. Ya, I’m here to serve you. I wonder how one gets to the place he finds himself. How must one detach from reality, focus solely on oneself, and then have the lack of awareness to ask such a question? “Are you here for us?”
I shift from rock to rock, pondering the absurdity of what photography has become.
She holds her rod and reel upside down, using her left hand to crank the reel backwards. I lack the heart to tell her, but before long, she is pulling mackerel. Whatever works. Lines fly, crossing over, four, five, six hooks stacked one below the other. Clear water and a channel full of bait fish. The mackerel feed on them, and we feed on the mackerel, or cut them up to lure other, larger, grander, more powerful fish to market. I’ve seen massive striper pulled from this same location. Bending rods and arms, and sweat forming on brows. Drag tightened as the reel sings. Fish making desperate moves for deeper water.
Comment after comment about the size of my lens. The consensus is that the lens is so large that it must guarantee “good shots.” “What channel are you with?” someone asks. “Channel 69,” I reply. “I don’t think I get that one,” the person says while walking away, looking backwards over their shoulder at me. Suspicious. I hold the lens to my eye and frame up an assortment of things in the distance. I shoot across the harbor, out to sea, and back toward land dwellings. I shoot compressed down the jetty. A jumble of humans and tackle being used incorrectly. Buckets fill with blood. A hook catches a bare leg. There are language barriers, but smiles all around.
A Vietnamese man with a long net at the end of a wooden pole creeps down the water line and begins his dance. A master at work. Dig, dig, dig, up comes the net, shaking with silver sparkles. His entire bucket fills in minutes. The locals stare in awe. He creeps back up the jetty face, jumps in his Lexus Hybrid, and departs. Destination unknown. I daydream of fryers and eating the heads. I dream of pictures in print. Pages of color and black and white, bound and tortured, waiting to decay. I wonder why I still do this.
As we enter the restaurant, we pass two couples. One of the women glances at me but doesn’t look away. “Here we go,” I think to myself. She turns to her friend and says, “I think that was Brad Pitt.” I don’t see it, but it never fails to give me a laugh. Were they younger, they would have circled back, phones out, ready to pounce, but the elderly are just happy to be alive. Happy the heartburn hasn’t hit yet. I’m with them. Day by day, minute by minute. Take it all in. In the words of Glenn Fry in season one of Miami Vice. “I always like to take a good-bye look at America, just in case it’s my last”.
The air and tide turn. Onshores howling. Crispness in the trees. The feeling of being left behind. That’s what it is. The crowds depart, mostly. Don’t worry about fentanyl or the fictional Antifa bad guys, but do worry about the two most horrifying things that can come to your town: the tour bus and the cruise ship. God have mercy on your village. You don’t stand a chance. Move aside and take a knee. Badges, tactical clothing, and serious girth. Hey, good on them for getting out.
Sometimes I think the most important part of photography is the conversation we have with ourselves while we are shooting. It’s not that I don’t care what you think of my photography, it’s just that I don’t care what you think of my photography. I write more when I’m out of the house. I shoot more, too. Heck, I think more. Sitting in front of a computer is deceptive. It makes you think you are doing things, but you aren’t. You are looking at things. Big dif. Photography gets the world on you. Like walking through a doorway into the tangible, messy, itchy, rash-inducing landscape. Fiery, cold, gritty, and adorned with sound and texture.
The key here is observation. “Look at that light,” I say to the strangers around me. They know the sunset, but not much else. Nuance is one of those academic words that makes people think you are an East Coast liberal elite, but it’s still a good word. I like it. And it’s what life is about, mostly. Nuance. Subtle changes that go unobserved unless you look for them. You won’t find them on the phone. Today, I can see the house next door slightly better than I could the day before. Hmm. The gull pulls a massive green crab from the harbor mouth. They fight, at least for a while. The gull picks up the crab then tosses it on the rocks, again and again. You know the outcome, but the dance is important. Just keep watching. Hope, no hope. Hope, no hope. Then, with a widening of the throat, a flip and a toss, the entire crab goes down the gullet, shell and all. It’s over, just like that.
Comments 14
“Ma’am.” “You’re holding your reel upside-down” I say to her. “No-Big-Dif” she responds, as she hooks into another fish. On another note: Frey and Henley…Incredible songwriters.
Author
I loved me some Glenn Frey. Smuggler’s Blues. Epic. Vice, epic. Fishing, epic.
A bit off topic…. Being a self professed bird brain of some degree – if your travels take you through central NY state, I think you would enjoy a visit to Cornell”s Sapsucker Woods (https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/visit) a wonderful place for a walk and a fascinating ornithology center. Just off Rt 13 away from the main part of the Cornell campus there is plenty of parking (always an issue on college campuses).
Author
I Just drove through NY. Still here, actually, but no time for birding, at least anything major. Work mode for a while.
What’s with the line in all your recent photos…is it a copyright kind of thing?
Author
Page layouts. That’s just the gutter running down the center of the spread. I always print what I’m shooting, so I like showing what the image would look like on a page.
A couple of questions for you:
1. Long ago, you mentioned that people used to confuse you for an actor, and it caused chaos, but you wouldn’t say who. Based on what you wrote in paragraph 5 of this post, was it always Pitt? I assumed it was Lowe.
2. Was picture 4 a faithful recreation of what you saw milliseconds after they noticed you, or did you manage to catch that moment in real time? The lad’s frown looks natural.
People like me probably spoiled the last guy you mentioned in paragraph 1. Most of my street photography is candid. However, I often talk to people and offer to send them the photographs later. On rare occasions, this has led to future photoshoots. Rarer still, a friend. Most often, an ignored email with carefully dodged, burned, and dust-cloned attachments.
I know that suspicious look you get very well, by the way. I get it every time I wear a camera.
Author
1. When I was younger and had long hair, and lived in LA, it was Brad Pitt. I had some truly scary moments when people thought I was him. As I got older and had my hair short, it was Lowe. Met him once, super nice, normal guy.
2. real time. That’s typically all I do. Unless I’m shooting portraits.
3. I talk to people too, and will send them whatever they want, but this guy was asking “Are you here for us?” That was the first time I heard that.
“I shift from rock to rock, pondering the absurdity of what photography has become.”……….The nuance has departed from photography. Discuss. I ponder daily the absurdity of many things, I have no rock to shift to and from, chairs and pavements suffice. But, there is a lot of nuance in your statement, and it strongly resonated with me. Since hanging up my call sheet as stills photographer, I’ve found it incredibly difficult to find my photographic calling. I occasionally venture into the city with a small camera but find myself feeling embarrassed even holding it. I stop to take a shot of something suitably banal and see someone walking my way. I stop and pretend I’m checking my phone, almost like I’ve been caught perusing the top shelf of a newsagents, as it was. I feel awkward and futile at the same time. At this point I feel a sense of absurdity. Why am I even bothering to take a picture of a discarded twisted cigarette packet? By now I’ve surrendered to the absurdity of my quest to make a picture of importance. I appreciate banality and absurdity are common bedfellows when it comes to photography. So, the question is: having pondered on the thought of absurdity, in relation to photography, how does one negate this abstraction? Is it possible that photography has become insignificant? By comparison to the years before digital and the internet, it probably has. Street photography, that ever accessible genre is in many ways similar to fishing, except I think fishing is more rewarding. Maybe it’s time to stop trying to ‘take pictures,’ after all, photography shouldn’t feel forced, it should come naturally. I am thinking the absurdity is overwhelming, and as Paul Graham said, ” lacks intentionality.”
….* EDIT…… as Paul Graham said…….”Photography lacks intentionality.”
Author
Oh ya…
Author
I love me some Paul Graham. I’m not sure. I think this is a personal thing. For me, the juice is making the work. What comes after, ahhh, don’t really care. I’ve always been this way, and it’s worked for me, but I don’t think it will for others. I see too many people trying to do too much too soon, and with crazy expectation levels. This is a sickness of modern culture. Not saying you are there. I’m saying don’t fight it, or force it. Think back to what made you pick up a camera in the first place.
Yup, that’s how the cookie crumbles.
Author
Darn.