Connecting with the camera

 

I was on vacation last week on Maui. I didn't take my computer, as I wanted a break from staring at a monitor. My evenings weren't filled with image processing as they almost always are when I travel. Instead, I shared the time with Robin, which was the point, except when she was working on Facebook (she brought her computer), and when I was working on Facebook on my iPhone. I read four novels during the week.

It was like the old days of traveling with film, when I wouldn't know what I got until I returned home.

What I did was photograph only where and when I felt compelled to. When something in the environment tugged at me hard enough to say, “stay, look, understand.” I was not out to capture or document our travels. I shot only when I felt the need.

That need is based on a particular approach to photography that I talk about whenever I lecture on travel photography. If the camera is useful for you to deepen your connection with a place or with a moment, then it is a tool of value. If it is a burden and a barrier to being in the moment, then the camera has no place. Have the experience of where you are, not the experience of fussing with a camera.

There are big swaths of this trip largely undocumented. When we went snorkeling, I left the camera behind at the hotel. I didn't want to leave it on the beach or the car. Being in the ocean is such a novel experience for me, overwhelming and disconcerting, that a camera of any kind would only have been a burden. It would have separated me from my experience. The trip to Hana, on the nervewrackingly busy 1½ lane road, generated no photographs. I couldn't place myself in that environment in any way that I could connect with it. The landscape was too dense, my anxiety over the drive too high (my problem, not the driver's—Robin was better at it than I would have been), that there was no point to photography until I settled down. Over several drinks. For a couple of days.

There was one spot however, on the southern road between Hana and Kula, that completely captured me. The why of it is a mystery and need not be solved, but there was a particular grove of Kiawe trees on a hillside that made me say, “Stop. Now.” For the better part of an hour I just roamed this small spot, feeling more content and grounded than I had the previous seven days.

I believe that there are certain geographies that attract us, places that pull us toward them or, similarly, repel us away from them. There's a spot in Ireland, a certain grouping of rocks, that over the course of four trips to that area, showed up on my contact sheets every time. Completely without intention. That one spot had a powerful hold on me. It was in a landscape that regularly recurred in my dreams, long before I ever travelled to that region.

This spot, high above the Pacific and in the rain shadow of Haleakala, likewise drew me into its orbit. I complied, and paid attention with the camera. I really wanted to know this place, and the camera is the best way I know to do that. Then I sat in the grass and gazed around me. For a long time.

More Maui photos at my Flickr stream.

Comments

[David Adam Edelstein]

I'm glad you seem to have had a good time, despite the gross excess of sun you encountered :-) And the photos have made me terribly homesick.