Mounted into sockets in my skull are two prime lenses. They are 35mm, a focal length that mimics the field of view of the human eye, according to photographers. What my prime lenses see is recorded on a memory card (my brain) for easy recall later. Then, rather than roll these memories back to myself like a movie, my imagination presents them to me as a series of stills. Frozen moments that I can spend time inside, to notice things. Which is kind of handy when you’re a writer.
Here’s the strange part. My head camera operates independent of my consciousness, as if my peripheral vision is recording snapshots from the margins of my day while I do other things. I recall details that I didn’t know I knew, often just as my hands are poised over my keyboard ready to write. If I’ve written a great scene, I don’t put that down to inspiration, but to how well I file the images that are taken by my head.
This is how I use the camera set on my neck.
Recently it occurred to me that it might be good to also use a digital camera. As a backup resource – as a backup head – in case I lose my memory. And so I take shots with it around the margins of my life: more shots than I need, because that’s my method. I speculate on finding good content somewhere within the multiples.
Take a recent photograph I captured at a performance by Camerata, Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra, who were playing in a restaurant in Brisbane’s West End. I don’t know why I was focused on the audience; I didn’t have a plan to capture anything specific. I was just randomly firing my shutter. Later, when I edited and cropped one image, I discovered something that I hadn’t seen. There was a man sitting at a table, distracted from the music. He’d been caught with what could have been an unplanned expression, maybe just as he straightened the kink from his neck. Yet the writer in me saw a man who was sick at heart, detached; I saw a weariness in his eyes that told me a story. He was bereft at the loss of something. Or someone.
Or take the photograph (below) of a trade lot full of boom lifts with their aerial platforms on full extension. An interesting enough photo – nothing more – until you notice later, as I did, one machine in the foreground. It’s like their leader, rallying its troops for an invasion.
These are accidental narratives – they happen for me on the page too, often as I edit, as if there’s a slight kink in a moment or a situation that I haven’t seen in my own words before. Or maybe it’s a resonance I’ve missed that a reader notices later and shares with me. Or I’ll see something new foregrounded in words I’ve written after they’ve been set aside for some time.
Photographs are part of my writing process. I use them like a catalyst to force an accident. If I’m composing a scene set in a living room, I’ll find a pic of a living room that I’ve taken somewhere, even if it wasn’t originally for that purpose. Not so I can record the details faithfully, because that might be anachronistic or inaccurate – but to see if there is something that might shake my assumptions about such a room.
I’m looking for contradictions or quirks: the badly made bed, the vase with a cigarette in the water, a foreign-language chocolate wrapper on the floor. It takes time to see these details, and a still image gives me time to walk around inside a space or a moment and observe it more deeply. It’s worth the effort, because the things I discover often give my stories unplanned dimensions, freeing them from the rigidity of plot and planning.
I don’t consider myself a very good photographer. It’s more luck than talent if I’ve captured a useful image and stored it somewhere I can retrieve it from. And if a moment of beautiful light or a profound expression of place finds its way into my prose, that’s because I’ve somehow managed to be present in this way in life.
With a camera.
I never leave home without one. Either the one mounted on my neck or the one tucked in my hand.
Usually, it’s both.
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