confessions of a photographing obsessee

DAY 197

§ A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. § Oscar Wilde

 Oh I am so terrible at this!! I am always too busy. But I shouldn’t be. There is always time for photos, there is always time to write!

That said, I am obsessed with photos, I really am. I am obsessed with beautiful photos. And okay, Oscar, maybe, in some ways, they are as useless as pretty flowers, but…but…I love them, I can’t resist taking them, I need to have the photos. I can’t just go someplace beautiful and NOT take a photo, at least, not without feeling sick and terrible.  They are beautiful, yes, like flowers. Perhaps useless to others, but to me, they are so much more.

I went to this castle in a place called Peñiscola (yes, you can laugh) which is possibly the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.  In the center, there is a castle. The blue of the Mediterranean goes on as far as the eye can see, row after row of white houses blanket the ground, topped by row after row of orange roofs. It is the perfect combination, and sort of makes you think that maybe you’re dead after all, and this is what heaven looks like. Or maybe you’ve fallen down a well and are now in wonderland. Or perhaps this is just paradise.

I fell in love with those photos. On the train-ride back to my flat, I was antsy with anticipation to look at them. I tried to resist temptation—no, you can’t look at them on the tiny screen, wait until you can view them on the computer!—but I failed, and couldn’t resist a peek. Oh, so gorgeous. I almost died again.

Then what happened, you ask? Well, I went home. I plugged in the card reader. And….nothing. The card reader was dead. It had committed suicide somewhere along the way. Oh NO! I tried everything. I looked it up online, downloaded programs, tried and retried and retried. I went to the camera store, and then he told me the sad truth, the truth I already knew but didn’t want to admit. My baby was sick, and the card was unsalvageable.

I was so sad, so depressed. You see, I am obsessed with the photos. It’s as if having no photos of something means it didn’t happen. I know it makes no sense, but bear with me!  It doesn’t help that I have a terrible memory. So I use my photos to make sure I never forget something worth remembering.

What did I do? The next weekend, I paid another €25 for the train ticket, spent another couple hours on the train, bought another pricy (but delicious) meal of sangria, pizza, and ice cream, enjoyed the views all over again—because I went back. Yup, I went all the way back to Peñiscola to get back those photos.  I’m glad I did. I found a lot more this time. I appreciated it even more than the first time. I met some interesting, and very proud, Dutch tourists who were fond of telling me about Holland’s Golden Age and how they made America what it is today (they voted for America to be it’s own governing state way back when) etc. I saw the cliffs.  I enjoyed the views. I didn’t get lost.

In the end, both days were perfect…and the resulting pictures were so worth the return!

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looking by moonlight

DAY 105

Look at the picturesque moonlight over the lake. How romantic and charming and beautiful and poetic. Taking a moonlight stroll sounds lovely.  Walking under the moon, the dim light shining down on you, it just makes you think of a nice romance novel or chick flick right? You know, at the very end, when s/he forgives him/her, it’s all resolved, everything’s happy.  Or perhaps it sounds like that aha! moment in a movie, when suddenly everything makes sense.

Looks can be deceiving.  What if I told you that this “lake” is actually  stagnant pond next to a (smelly) stagnant canal along a canal path frequented by bums and otherwise strange people? If I said that this charming lake was really just an algae covered bit of excess drainage water where there seems to be a never-ending string of said bums fishing out of the backs of their SUVs and pickups? What if I said there was nothing poetic about this moment, that I stopped here not because I thought it was pretty and romantic, not because I was feeling all Keats and Shelley-esque out to celebrate the beauties of nature, but because on my way back from the library, I had to skid to a halt to avoid hitting something because my bike is broken (the brakes sort of don’t work…)? Hmm, very beautiful sounding.

Regardless, I like this.  I ride/walk/run past here everyday, and I guess sometimes the things you see everyday you don’t really look at properly, you don’t really appreciate.  Well, maybe you just need to look at things in a different light (or in this case, almost no light..?) to actually see them.

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