The other day I visited the Cascades Raptor Center with my camera. A rain front was looming, and it would be the last day of the hot and dry weather. I figured if I waited to go, I'd be flitting from aviary to aviary, hunched over my camera while trying to take photographs of raptors huddled away against the rain.
Some of the residents have afternoon walks or at least sessions where they are brought out. Taking pictures of them is always easier when this is so because I don't have to contend with the mesh of their enclosures. If a resident is mewed up and I get close to the mesh and the resident is on the other side of their aviary, it's possible to blur out the bars, but there's always some kind of interference pattern superimposed over the raptor I'm photographing.
I've become enough of a regular over the last few years -- between my long hair and long-lensed camera apparently I stand out -- and I was chatting with one of the handlers and he asked, "What do you do with all the pictures you take?"
The question gave me a little pause. "Oh, I said, mostly I store them on Google Photos." I thought a little more. "I like to tell myself that I will use them as resources for drawing birds, but I'm pretty awful when it comes to illustrating them. I am interested in seeing how they inspire the shapes for Middle Kingdom Egyptian Hieroglyphs; if you look at their legs --"
"--their pantaloons?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, "and also how their wingtips and tail feathers come together." And then the conversation veered onto hieroglyphs.
Later, at home, the subject of photographs came up. Mark said, "You know, honey, nobody is going to look at those photographs -- especially after you die. So if you want people to see them, you'd better start arranging a funeral slideshow now."
"Why wait for a funeral?" I asked. "Once COVID is under control (fingers crossed on that one), we can have people over for a little salon and we can have wine and cheese and set up three projectors in rotation and people can wander in little groups between the screens."
"Honey, that's called 'a home slide show,' and people hated them back in the 1950's."
"Yes," I said, "I believe I've heard that referenced as 'The Bore Wars.'" (And I do remember my folks having little get-togethers and bringing out Slide Carousels of Their Adventures Overseas.)
The question about that I ultimately do with the photos has lingered, especially as I uploaded them to various social media sites. I enjoy taking pictures of the raptors for the same reason I enjoy taking pictures of MET artifacts or the Moon or other astronomical phenomenon: the thrill of collecting. It's more than just collection, though, it's also marking a particular time or space -- akin to the attitude behind the phrase, "what is remembered, lives." Additionally, there are cathartic elements of being a participant-observer of something outside of oneself. But these answer the question of why I take the photos, not what I do with them afterward.
I suppose what I do with them doesn't matter so much -- except that if that were true, I'd go through my photo collections and erase everything. So keeping them is important; but my feeling is that they're more than just mementos validating my duration. I suspect that this is a manifestation of the Art versus Craft question -- once you've made something creative or artistic, what are you going to Do with it?
I think this is the point where I go an find a copy of the "Art For Art's Sake" manifesto....
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