The Stolen Soul

I love making pictures.  I like what cameras do.  I like looking through a viewfinder and watching the world transformed.  The world through a viewfinder is not the world we know from looking otherwise.  A camera is transformational.   When you look at a person through the viewfinder. . . well, dare I say it?  No, I dare not. You either know or you don't.  

And what remains?  

She is forty now.  Cameras are magic boxes.  They do what nothing else can.  

They steal souls.  So "the primitives" believed.  Those who believe in such things have always been suspicious of photography.  

Saul Leiter's nudes have gotten a lot of attention.  For ever so long, I wondered why.  It has only recently occured to me that the nudes most people see are shot for something other than personal reasons.  Leiter's nudes are of lovers and close friends taken in his apartment.  They are intimate.  One doesn't see such things in print. I never thought of that, though, because I have been making such images since I was a college student.  My girlfriends, my friends, me.  When I was at the university, our naked images hung in the school's photo gallery.  I look back with love on those pictures now. 

The tenant told me yesterday that she is glad I made so many photos and videos of her and her son.  She regrets now the things she did not do.  But those years have been well recorded.  Not so many people have such a wonderful record of their lives.  

Personal images. Call them snapshots.  I love a snapshot.  Now I understand people's interest in Leiter's nudes.  They are intimate images of people's lives together.  They are true snapshots.  

I take photos of things now, inanimate objects.  My mother sometimes, but those are far too sad for me.  I long to make intimate images again. 

Rather, I am left with this.  Abstractions, reflections.  But I want to steal souls.  I am a photographic vampire.  All I need is a willing recruit.  

People like to look behind the curtain.  They yearn for the intimate.  They want to see the stolen soul.  

* * * 

I have a busy week.  I take my mother to the dentist in a bit. I am forced to make an appointment with my own doctor if I want to keep getting the meds she has me hooked on.  There are financial things I must attend to or lose money.  And, of course, the Xterra.  All on no sugar and reduced hooch.  There are sure to be surprises.  

The alarm is about to sound for my mother's eight o'clock pills, so I must attend.  

I'd love to sit in a cafe all day and just take pictures of the patrons, but that is no longer possible.  

Selavy. One does what one can. . . and maybe just a little more.