Photography and the trail
One of the things I’ve learned while planning my hike is that a whole lot of people have Youtube channels and feel it is important to document their lives. I have mixed feelings about this.
A little more than 40 years ago Brian McNamara and I decided to hitch-hike to California and we discussed whether it was important to bring a camera along. There was no internet, of course, no pocket-sized cell phone video, no Youtube, but we discussed (at some length as I recall) the pros and cons of creating a visual record. In the end we decided that the danger of creating such a record was the possibility that creating the record might become the purpose of the trip, and that because the nature of life is memory rather than record we would do better to let the chips fall. We’d remember what was memorable and forget what was not. I think we made the right choice.
In the following years, I did a whole lot more hitchhiking, sometimes with Brian, sometimes alone. I crossed the country four or five times, hitched down into Florida and up to Nova Scotia, into Canada and Mexico, and because I never carried a camera it is all sort of blurred together now. It’s difficult to say, exactly, what happened on which trip and though I remember many interesting people, I can’t say with certainty in every case precisely when or on which trip we crossed paths. There are a lot of stories.
So, as I sort my gear, I weigh this in my mind. Times have changed and so have I, and I suspect that had I had the tools in 1977 that I have today, Brian and I might have made a different choice. I don’t think I have any interest in being a Youtuber or starting a vlog, but I will (like everyone else) be carrying a pretty good digital camera (phone) and be able to upload photos and thoughts directly to Substack; so I wonder how this will color my experience. It’s not a silly question.
In “On Photography”, Susan Sontag wrote of photography creating a "chronic voyeuristic relation" with the world in which all experience is leveled and made uniform. There is something to this. She also suggested that the act of recording precludes the ability to interact--”intervene” is the term she used if I recall correctly—the person who is recording can not intervene, and the person intervening can not faithfully record. There is something to this, too. Generally, I take photos to preserve an image, not to capture a moment and freeze it in time like an insect embedded in amber. Substitute “being present in the moment” for “intervene” and the point becomes a little bit more clear.
Therefore, if any are interested, I suspect my posts will consist more of text than photos or videos, and what photos there will be will be of compositions that I find striking more than snapshots to document a moment. Of course, that is bound to happen too, because that is what happens when one has a camera in his pocket. “Look! This is the start of the trail.” or “This was a very cool dog.” That sort of thing. It’s unavoidable because I won’t spend much time thinking about it.
This is probably best and exactly my point. I’ll check in and upload things I write along the way, but I don’t think I’ll set out with the intention of documenting my experience on the trail. That would require thinking about it too much, rather than living it, and I’m not willing to make that trade-off. If you read what I write as I hike, you’ll certainly hear about what I experience, but it won’t be a linear narrative—this, and then this, and then this. I suspect it will more like a prose poem: “This piece of equipment sucks, and my feet hurt, and it rained again, and I like coffee and I’m sick of oatmeal...oh, and look at this vista!” That sort of thing.