Written April 22, 2022

2:20pm

It is easy to fall in love with an inanimate object. Things don’t disappoint you like people do. They don’t leave. They don’t change. They don’t lie. And they don’t die. The worst they do is collect dust.

I fell quite madly in love with The Century. It was the first constant companion I’d ever had. It was so beautifully large, its forty pound Mahogany body already worn with age with a black brass shutter, red leather bellows, and nickel coated hardware.

I remember how my arms shook as I lifted the handle, my body responding to the red hot curiosity jerking the metal tabs upward. I couldn’t tell you now if it was the rush of dust or smoke or some unseen entity that made my eyes water, but it was a blurry first look. The gravel beneath my sunken knees morphed into powder and I blinked twice to get my bearings. No change. Just buzzing in my ears and a spinning sensation around me, as though the parking lot had shattered to reveal a world of white waiting beneath. My fingers reached for the rail of The Century, an innate knowing told me that this beast would ground me, and it did. Click. But wait, I didn’t do anything, did I? I didn’t know who I was anymore, the earth no longer held me still. All I could feel was chaos. All I could see was The Century. It rose to meet me at eye level, our respective lenses blinking in recognition. A visual handshake. It didn’t speak, I heard.

“ Before we speak, we see.”

In my novel, One of the main characters is a Camera. It is intended to be a large 4x5 camera (see images below of the 4x5 camera I own). I have always loved the idea of giving voice to objects, as Toy Story most famously popularized. The writer of toy story simply asked, “What is toys came alive when we left?”. My own version of that is, “What if a camera really could See?”

My undergraduate education was completed at Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, with a major in photography. In high school I taught myself black and white photography what is now referred to as “The old school way.”. My parents gave me a 35mm Minolta camera for my 14th birthday upon my request, and for the next 12 years that was my life’s work. I discovered that my high school had an unused darkroom that was long abandoned and I asked to clean it up, purchase the supplies, and begin using it. I started a photography club to validate my purposes. When I wasn’t behind curtains and headsets on stage crew or reading a historical fiction novel, my entire high school career was spent in the darkroom, or wondering when I would be back.

Adolescence holds the great gift of leisure. It is what we miss most decades later as the Responsibilities of life descend upon us.

And so, I had all the time in the world to learn this craft slowly.

The previous post to this holds the introduction that I wrote in my phone in a local coffee shop in 2019.

Photography was my first true love, and when it crept into my writing i was not surprised. they say every author’s first novel is just a repackaging of themselves. amateur writers write what they know first, and that is absolutely what I am doing now. I can’t help it. I hope I can grow from it.

In any case, I knew I wanted a character to be a photographer. I have every journal I’ve ever filled, and in my time as a photographer I would often muse about the deeper aspects of photography: the act of seeing, the portals we access, and of course how the lens is an extension of our eye- or ourself- and what that means for the art form. I will spare you further inner Dialogue.

I have a writing coach that I speak to every now and then. She is Jewish. When I told her that I envisioned the camera being portrayed as a living entity, that I saw the lens as an eye, and that I even wanted it to have its own voice she asked me if I knew about Kabbalists. I didn’t. Medieval Kabbalists believed that all things are linked to God, making all levels of creation a part of one great chain of being. Similarly, animism is the attribution of a soul to plants and Inanimate objects. So, of course, my idea was really nothing new.

I find comfort in these words and belief systems, though. Because even though I don’t prescribe myself to any one religion, i do enjoy the process of research for this novel to be endlessly illuminating. I get to learn more about the world, and the people in it, by simply thinking about what I want to write, and letting myself get lost in the stories of all the people who have asked the same questions I ask now.

THIS was what I loved most about being a photographer: It was a tool that gave me access to see the world & experience the people living inside it.

Now, I find that writing does the same.

Novel Excerpt: The Eye of a Camera

Year 19

Novel Excerpt: “ A world he did not yet know he knew”