Yerbas Mexicanas

Yerbas Mexicanas. Tucson, Arizona, 2014

An image from the barrio viejo just south of the Tucson city center. For good or ill, the area is slowly becoming gentrified as artists and higher income folks move in, remodel, and park their BMWs in the various driveways, carports and old adobe garages.

And…another thing to ponder as we travel around to such places with our cameras like nooses around our respective traveler-photographer necks:

“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it–by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”

–Susan Sontag, On Photography

Sounds a bit pessimistic to me. I suppose such a danger exists–imagine those Genghis hordes of tourists bailing off of the nuclear-powered bus and crowding the edge of the Grand Canyon with their photo machines. Are they merely collecting souvenirs? Or, are they also having an experience of wonder in the face of an incredible natural miracle? Or both? Or does it simply depend on the individual?

(As a side comment to Ms. Sontag’s quote, I prefer the idea of “creating” or “making” images to the notion of “taking” them.)

I do admit to liking the act of making and collecting nice images…but I also think, while I am there, I thoroughly enjoy the experience of being in the present moment in an interesting, unusual or beautiful place or circumstance. In fact, sometimes I come back from these places with a photo count right at zero–but I still enjoyed the experience of looking and seeing all the same.

How about you?