The Grain part 2

The clearest photographs I've ever taken were the several rolls of 35MM film from my time in Portugal in 1998. By this time, all of the large manual cameras had made way for very small point and shoot models. I had a tiny Olympus. The blues of the skies at midday contrasted with the whites of old churches made me question that the reality of the journey was possible when the photographs afterward looked so different.

In Portugal, believe me, I was not looking for perfection. I was reading John Irving. I was writing pointless meandering fictions. I was trying to figure out in my post college graduation year of malaise what I wanted to do with my life. I came to only one conclusion: I wanted to write.

If only my words were as clear as those photographs.

In the Algarve during the afternoons, I photographed shadows and derelict farms. Aging shadows and derelict places would become what I would do. Aging shadows would become most, if not all of my characters in everything I would write. Derelict places would become what I search for when carrying a camera. All of this was just something I would not have known about myself or my future when I was in Portugal. Time would make sense of all of that.

Despite the clarity of the photos of Portugal, nothing else was clear. And even later work with that camera, and all the other cameras, nothing was ever that clear again. Rather, the photos always had a level of graininess that did not unsettle me, but kept everything from being perfection.

Incidentally, I have never searched for perfection, I have never wanted perfection because it just never seemed possible or possible in any sort of timely fashion. Fuck perfection, I'd rather have life. I'd rather have right now.

No, the graininess of my photos comforted me. And years later when I began playing with toy cameras, the grain of the pictures came home to me. After all, if you look for aging shadows and derelict places, doesn't the grain look better anyway?