"This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph..."

Finding some wisdom 30 years after the fact: Years ago while at summer camp I tried reading Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I do not know if I was able to finish it or not, but it did not leave much of an impression on my conscious mind. I remember thinking it was not what I had expected it to be, but beyond that my memory fails me. I have picked it up again, nearly 30 years later and am having a different experience with it...

It started with a childhood desire to ride a bike: In December I bought an old motorcycle that is just about as old as me, and which has been sitting still for quite some time. I thought it would make a good metaphorical and practical project for me in my middle years to learn a new skill and bring a beat up—but potentially functional—machine back to a level of coolness that demands to be appreciated for it's ability to keep going with a little attention. And so I thought a book about motorcycle maintenance and the "metaphysics of quality"—as Pirsig calls his philosophy—might be a fun intellectual balance for my piston ring, carburetor valve, drum shoe repairs on my old Honda CB360...

Chapter 4 Excerpt, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: At one point early in the novel, the narrator, his son Chris, and two friends Sylvia and John arrive at the prairie. At a midday stop, Sylvia exclaims "It's so beautiful. It's so empty," while the narrator and his son stretch out on the ground to soak up some sunlight after a cool morning of riding. John gets his camera out:

After a while [John] says, “This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone.”

I say, "That's what you don't see in a car, I suppose."

Sylvia says, "Once when I was about ten we stopped like this by the road and I used half a roll of film taking pictures. And when the pictures came back I cried. There wasn't anything there."

I've been where John and Sylvia were that moment. I spent years (and still do at times) trying to force the fullness of nature into the frame of a camera. I am working on trying to embrace the narrator's mindset: letting the moment be vs. capturing the moment for some unknown future use or share...

The Extra 12 proceeded my Canon AE1: When I was young I had a Kodak 110 camera and began trying to capture the world on film. Little cartridges of 110 film that has to be developed before any real feedback of the image could be assessed. [Such a different pre-digital world I grew up in.] My Uncle was a professional photographer and my father is an incredibly good shot himself. They offered advice on framing and "getting people in the shot." They let me experiment as I would though to learn the lessons myself. I wanted to be as good as they were with my photos, and I kept trying to capture the vastness of nature (and doing a terrible job at it); but I was determined to reject their advice so as to not spoil shots of nature with people. [So naive.] You see, my reluctance of taking pictures of people was in part formed by the frequent times when grown-ups forced us to endure hellaciously long-seeming moments of posing for a photo (before allowing us to get back to whatever was going on before the photo session was initiated); moments where we were assembled, maneuvered, and asked to pose in awkwardly frozen moments. This process was the worst when in the hands of my mother's mother, Alma. [Alma was an amazingly wonderful woman; she was generous and patient, kind and beautiful, loving and interested; but she was one of the worst photographers in the world.] She would pull out her camera, affix her blinding flash cubes to her ancient device, square off both hands on each side (elbows out at 90 degree angles), and spend the next bajillion moments telling us how to get ready for the picture, while accidentally getting her finger in front of the lens, and just plainly punishing us with her need to capture moment after moment after moment, the same as the year before, and the year before that, and on, and on, and on... It was god-awful. And yet what she was seeking was far more important that creating an artistic rendition of a beautiful scene. I have grown to understand her desire to have keepsakes of the people she loved. I wish I had been more tolerant of her process. She was trying to capture images of her loves in order to show others back home who the cast of characters were while she told her stories. She was assembling a collection of memories, not art...

Fail: This shot would be much better with my brothers in it.

The young know so little and are so impatient; the old should try to remember how the young think: But this reflection isn't about capturing moments of the ones we love, it is about that attempt to capture the expansive beauty of nature in it's emptiness. [The realization of the former is a pleasant byproduct of my attempt to understand the latter.] How does one capture an empty prairie? How does one communicate the immensity of a mountain peak or the depth of a chasm on a 4x6 inch piece of photo paper? A professional might be able to do it, and we amateurs might luck into one of these moments, but for the most part we need to experience these moments. The narrator of Pirsig's story knows that even when observed from a car, these views aren't felt the same way. It takes removing the front glass, and the A and B posts of the car; it means stripping away the roof, putting on some goggles, and allowing the panoramic aspect of the world wrap around the viewer. John states just as much (yet still goes for his camera), and Sylvia shares her early failed efforts. (Chris, by the way, is impatient to keep moving as often the young ones are.) It seems that only the narrator understands fully how the moment must be absorbed...

Some times a thousand words is better than a picture: The best way to share these moments is with words, I think. And yet the reader MUST have had a similar experience in order to appreciate the description. Even the best description in a novel of the open prairie shifting to the rising peaks of the Rockies, the hours of fast driving through the monotonous acres of wheat and an occasional crossroads yielding to the purple and white of the two mile high range of mountains that stretches the full length of a continent, cannot do the image justice unless you've been there at least once to see it for yourself...