letters from barabbas

This is an essay I had published in The Auburn Circle last year. The Circle is the university's general interest magazine, it's really cool and I was super excited to be included in it. This is for those of you who didn't get to read it in print.


I read an essay for world history that claimed the development of the written word during the urban revolution caused a shift from an auditory to a visual society. In today’s world of hyper-communication via the Internet and television, this principle has flourished. From fine art to paparazzi, formal events to casual outings, photography permeates every aspect of our culture. When treated responsibly, this captivity of instants is the perfect preservation of our history: a personal fossil record, if you will. When used carelessly, however, it begins to pose a problem.

We hold onto our lives’ defining moments by stamping sensations into our minds and building memories around them. But the memory is more than a mental image—it’s an event that’s been processed to produce a truth about life. These days everyone has a camera, and we’re often content to let Kodak make the images for us. I fear we may be losing the skill that the invention was meant to supplement. It’s become more about the image than the event, as if we might someday require proof that our lives really happened. But our recollections only blur together in page after page of hasty snapshots void of any personal revelation. This is why holiday gatherings with my family are always interrupted just as the fun is really starting. Warm conversation and contented smiles give way to “Say cheese” incantations and fidgety, plastered grins. The memory doesn’t match the image, and those portraits come back seeming stale and contrived, giving the whole occasion a false appearance of tedium and disinterest.

When my roommate and I sat down at the computer last year to research the best route for our trip that summer, I was participating with a skepticism that reminded me of a teenager smugly ignoring his younger sibling’s latest scheme. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go. I just never expected to have any real adventures in my lifetime. I had conditioned myself to confine my experiences to the inside of my cranium, never expecting to actually live life…you know, like, within the actual space-time continuum. But when it became clear that this was more than just another youthful daydream, one of my chief concerns involved the acquisition of a good camera with which to document this living of life I was planning for the summer. While John was content to carry along a handful of disposable cameras, I excavated my parents’ old Canon from its flaking leather case and taught myself the basic functions, snapping candids of friends and flowers and furniture.
For three thousand miles I abducted scenery and wildlife into my little black box. Stone presidents and prairie landscapes were jammed indiscriminately into tiny parcels and stored for later review. It was a desperate attempt to document what I knew to be a one-time experience. When we got to Yellowstone ten days into our expedition, I was a picture-taking machine. I eagerly encapsulated intricate lichens and stately firs, endearing little prairie dogs and intimidating bison, canyons and cascades and mudpots and hot springs. Yellowstone is an amazing place—everyone’s a photographer within its boundaries.

We didn’t make it to Old Faithful until the end of our second day in the park. I must admit I was less than excited about it. Maybe I was just depleted after two weeks of being constantly on the move, with 3,000 miles of asphalt behind me and 3,000 more ahead. There’s only so much wonder one pair of eyes can behold in a lifetime, and I wasn’t rationing mine out very wisely. I trudged sullenly past the lodge and visitor center, following the signs with total indifference. When John called out from ahead that the next eruption was expected to occur within ten minutes, I perked up and started walking faster. I began to run when I saw the steam, camera clunking heavily against my chest, but I stopped short a hundred yards from the viewing platform when the first big column began to unfurl. I raised my camera to my eye only once, matter-of-factly clicking the shutter with little attention to centering and lighting. I knew instinctively that this was something bigger than film.
It was a rare moment of clarity. For the brief duration of the eruption, I wasn’t vying for the perfect shot or brewing up some elaborate dissertation on the experience: it was simple, silent awe. This plume of shimmering white emerging from the wasteland was an image I’d always longed for—I’ll never again struggle to imagine how it might have looked to the Israelites when God appeared in the wilderness as a pillar of clouds. The torrent subsided quickly, and I turned around to join the tide of excited tourists which carried me to its logical breaking point: the gift shop. I have never been more pleased to fork over eight bucks for a cheeseburger. I was famished! Living takes a lot out of a guy.

My second day back home I ran to the one-hour photo center to claim the trophies I had stored away in those little black canisters. Apparently, though, I’m not the camera whiz I’d thought I was: of the six rolls I had used, only one-and-a-half actually turned out. But God works in mysterious ways, and I think He wanted to clear my mind of all the hype that surrounded the trip and force me to reflect on the important things I had learned. I tried my hardest to preserve the experience with pictures, but of the forty prints I got back, only five or six actually do justice to the emotions I was feeling at the moment of the film’s exposure. I’ve since learned that a camera is not a substitute for good old-fashioned living. It is only a tool, harnessed by wisdom, good for summoning the power of a moment that has slipped into memory. We need that defining moment to provide the narrative that will breathe purpose into the image.

I’m not a photographer, so I can’t evaluate this little snapshot’s technical quality. But I do have good eyes for searching out the beauty in even the plainest things, and something really strikes me about it: something in the posture of the onlookers and the glowing boardwalk beneath them, something in the sheen of the waterspout against the mellow backdrop of the sky. I can just hear the distant sputtering, that singular stench is stinging at the back of my throat, and the silent wonder that’s surrounding those tourists threatens to consume me as well.
We all know the old cliché. A picture is worth a thousand words. But really, for most of us, that’s only true for a few rare gems out of dozens of disposable 35mm’s dropped in a bin at Wal-Mart. This is one of mine.