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I had sensed that our relationship was changing even before we left California, like a premonition glimpsed in the stirring of leaves or in a reflection caught between ripples. I was mourning a death that had not yet occurred, and whenever I turned to look at him it was like staring at a stranger. As I write, trying to make sense of where I went wrong, what words I spoke that I should have left unspoken, I am left with the sense some vital piece is missing. What I remember most vividly about our last conversation was the look of quiet desperation in his eyes which at the time I interpreted as frustration at his inability to articulate himself, but was probably, I understand now, a silent plea for me to stop. I never got a chance to thank him. 

By the time this novel coronavirus had made its way across the globe and social distancing became the new normal, I had already been living like a ghost in Bangor, Maine for a little over two months. We arrived in Bangor on January 20^th after a week of hauling ass across the United States. 

I had spent a week here the summer before just as it was ending, and the days were getting shorter. Then it had felt like a foreign place, an unknown country. My days had the quality of a last meal, perhaps because I had come all this way to accompany Heather, my significant other, who I would be leaving behind to pursue her graduate studies. I would join her some months later. 

The first few days back were the loneliest. They were short, frigid days which collapsed into each other like an existential pileup of time and space, the kind that leaves you confused about your whereabouts even as you fail to get out of bed. I did not know anyone here and made little effort to meet anyone. I seldom left my apartment. 

Photography allowed me a physical intimacy with this new place I call home as an unintended consequence of my aimless excursions through the surrounding neighborhoods, both in search of photographs and an interruption to the quiet monotony of my first Maine winter (and later quarantine). It is easy to love a city and not know it, to live in a city and only know a fraction of it. You stroll through familiar streets tracing epicycles of routine that render portions of the city invisible to you because of a kind of existential parallax. Photography allowed me to escape the routine of daily commutes; deviations that revealed new aspects of the city on each outing.

In this way I began to understand the geography of my new home, and landmarks began to emerge in the landscape from the ephemera of suburban life such that I could orient myself thanks to the pair of red plastic lawn chairs in the front yard of this house or the Trump 2020 sign planted askew in the lawn of that house. I became familiar with street names, and these helped too. Little by little the labyrinthine geometry of my new hometown came to make sense, though at times I felt no less dislocated. 

I quickly learned to read the everyday minefield of a frozen sidewalk or an unplowed street after a snowfall. I began to differentiate between kinds of snow. I got used to the bitter cold of winter which Mainers liked to remind me any chance they got was only bitter and cold by Californian standards, but in fact was relatively mild by Maine standards. What photography couldn’t do, not immediately anyway, was help me assimilate into the culture of the place. I realized this would take more time, and some effort on my part. 

I started reaching out to local farmers, grocers, chefs and restaurants hoping to integrate myself into the local food scene and create a collaborative network of local craftspeople and artisans. I would source my food and other consumables through this network all the while documenting different aspects of this process with a variety of end goals in mind for this work. I wanted my short time in Bangor to be meaningful regardless. 

I did not expect the extent to which the University of Maine would become a daily presence in my life, at least in those first few weeks. It began with an invitation to deliver two small lectures on screenwriting and film production to an underclass studying depictions of anthropological and archeological subjects in Hollywood cinema. Then my partner got word that her thesis would involve traveling to the coast of Peru to compile ethnographies of two different coastal communities, including the artisanal fishermen of Huanchaco. She would be doing this work in the summer, and I would accompany her as her documentarian. Later the opportunity arose to extend our stay in Peru as volunteers on an archeological project in Chachapoya. 

All this was short-lived as the evolving pandemic brought many of these plans to a screeching halt. Sometimes my belly feels like it will open up into a blackhole that swallows me whole, and I cannot tell if that is just a general anxiety or my body succumbing to SARS-Cov-2. I assume it is just anxiety and take a few deep breaths. 

I met a Peruvian writer at a dinner with Peruvian academics after a lecture on ritual human sacrifice, one night. He was a real writer I realized, not like what I do (Capote would call it typing). Dan, our host, mentioned every work he had produced, by genre not by title, as if he were going down a checklist the totality of which would qualify one as a writer. There was a novel, a volume of poetry, and several pieces of literary criticism, all of which culminated in tenure within the Spanish department at the University of Maine, Orono. You could say that when it came to making a career out of writing he had really crossed his t’s and dotted his i’s, while I could hardly place a comma in the correct place. He told me from across the table that we should go out one day. I smiled and agreed, but forgot to get his number, and now I may never. He lives two floors below me. Thank god for silver linings.  

As daily life became altered by the pandemic, I expected the subject matter of my photography to change as well. But I have struggled to capture the pandemic, to capture the banal terror and paranoia. Of course, the subject matter of my photography has changed, as a result of social distancing measures, but in ways I didn’t expect. I have found a new love for food photography and styling. Perhaps more meaningfully for my body of work, I have begun to point the camera inwards, towards my own domestic life. And I’ve come to realize that this is its own implicit record of the pandemic, or an aspect of it. 

This has to be enough, for now at least. Vacationland seems unchanged, if mildly inconvenienced, by the pandemic or the protests against state violence that have erupted globally. Our hospitals have not been overwhelmed by infections, our residents have not been tear gassed by their own state. There was a relatively small local gathering in a show of solidarity, which I could not attend. 

In a way it felt like self-imposed exile; after all I had come here of my own free will. While others were witness to history, I was witness to boredom and nostalgia and melancholy; in short my own solipsistic mood. At least that’s how it felt, anyway. If photography is a language, I lack the words and syntax to capture this pandemic. To do so requires the touch of a poet, not of a gossip; a whisper, not a shout.    

I realize I’ve never taken a portrait of my father or my mother, not like I’ve taken of brides or street vendors or other strangers. I can’t imagine reducing my father to a single image, I just don’t know the man well enough. Sometimes when I am alone and overcome with sadness and anger, I think about him. I remember evenings when he would come home smelling like earth, when he would wash away the sweat and soil with Head & Shoulders before leaving for the night shift at the AMPM. I imagine him in his polyester work shirt, standing alone at the register in the dead of night, and I wonder what he felt. If he ever got bored, or thought of running away? I wonder if he ever looked at my infant face, and felt pangs of regret. 

My mother on the other hand, I can see her seated next to my grandmother: the two are in my grandmother’s kitchen, engaged in some sort of food preparation as the midday sun floods in through the skylight above them. I wonder when and if I’ll get to capture that moment. That image of my mother is no less reductive, but it captures a vignette I’ve experienced many times before and hope to witness at least once more. I negotiate with the universe for the smallest kindness during times like these, the way you might beg an executioner for a final look at the sky before the hood is pulled over your head. The pandemic seems to have exploded the dimensions of distance; I pity separated lovers who must feel like ants on the surface of an inflating balloon. 

What I have lost by growing up in the U.S. is an urgency towards family. A loyalty and concern for family certainly still exists but in an untethered state; I am a comet tracing a parabolic orbit around them, returning every once in a great while out of habit and sheer inertia. I wonder if I’ll feel like this upon their death, even if some part of me already knows that it will ultimately all turn to guilt and regret. 

He tried to tell me something in my dreams, but even then he could not speak. I used to think you could know yourself completely, achieve total self-awareness. Now I think there is always some part of you that you cannot know, a kernel of  terra incognita that might get smaller and smaller as the years go by but never disappears; a sliver of yourself which you cannot see and will never see because of a kind of existential parallax that always keeps what’s behind your head hidden no matter how quickly you try to turn and see the ghost that walks with you. 

One night, during one of the last snowstorms of the winter, I walk out to an empty and dark parking lot. It has been freshly plowed but already the tracks of the snowplow are disappearing. There is nothing but snow and blackout as far as I can see in all directions, and this doesn’t change when I get on the road, my headlights the only visible light except for the occasional car passing me in the opposite direction blinking in and out of existence. The snow falls in big clumps of snowflakes. At a traffic light I get tired of waiting for the light to change and I run a red light, but there is no one to witness my trespass. As I drive on, I imagine the whole world buried under mountains of snow, but by the next morning much of it has already melted, and you can see soggy cigarette butts poke through and the cracks in the sidewalk beneath. 

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Author’s Note: Opinions of a Layman on Repression and Resistance, Part I can be found here. The sources which are linked to in the body of the essay are those used in its composition. This essay (as well as Part I) should be understood as a primer on these sources and a jumping off point for further, in-depth reading.

As I periodically check social media for news on the ongoing protest movements across the U.S. (and the world) engaged in the struggle against state violence, I sometimes delve into the comment section of news articles and op-eds to assess what kind of conversations are being had. On a post quoting Desmond Tutu’s declaration that if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor, one comment out of the many interpreting the quote in bad faith (and generally with no awareness of the privilege inherent in remaining neutral) stuck out to me the most. This young, white male posited that he had bigger concerns, namely environmental concerns. It reiterated just how fragmented our collective understanding of the superstructure’s function and reach is, for he failed to realize that to fight against a power structure that kills and imprisons BIPOC at disproportionate rates is to fight against a power structure that extracts and pollutes carelessly; they are one and the same. 

The COVID-19 death toll in the U.S. has climbed to 170,000 deaths and counting. Data is beginning to show the disproportionate infection and mortality burdens that BIPOC populations are shouldering, and as the data grows these disparities and the structural inequalities they point to become harder to ignore. This is yet another instance of the pandemic shining a light on structural problems within society. The increased infection and mortality burden shouldered by BIPOC cannot be adequately explained by genetic differences, instead it is likely the result of a complex of conditions that result in less access to wealth and healthcare which in turn have adverse health outcomes (and not merely in a COVID-19 context), historically the usual culprits in similar situations. This complex of racist and classist conditions includes BIPOC communities living in closer proximity as a result of cramped living conditions, holding a larger proportion of low-paying essential jobs in the service sectors and using public transportation to commute making it harder to socially distance. In many cases these communities, in addition to lacking access to adequate healthcare, must bear the consequences of environmental racism which places their health in a position of vulnerability long before coming in contact with SARS-Cov-2. 

Environmental racism can be understood as a complex of socio-economic and environmental injustices (political and real) that result from racial and class inequalities and discrimination. It has many differentiated yet interconnected manifestations on both local and global scales. In this way a diverse set of policies and practices that result in equally diverse outcomes, like the hyperlocal problem of Flint’s ongoing water crisis or the global problem of waste management, can be attributed to systemic racism and classism. We have to remember that deciding where to place a landfill or appropriate a carbon sink is not inherently a racist or classist act, but a racist and classist power structure will always engage in paradigms of uneven development that result in winners and losers along established lines of race and class. Uneven development is not accidental, it is a feature of the capitalist world-ecology. 

The rich and powerful create problems for all of us, then tell us we’re to blame.

Jason W. Moore

The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch dating to the beginning of Humanity’s increased impact on Nature’s earth systems. As environmental historian Jason W. Moore points out, the Anthropocene conversation is several; there is the conversation within scientific circles as to what constitutes an appropriate “golden spike” (an indication of change) in the stratigraphy, a conversation which in turn flows into the larger academic conversation around the periodization of the Anthropocene: when did it start? The importance of this question goes beyond establishing scientific facts (not the least because science both constrains and is constrained by the thought-structures of the day), but extends to how we conceptualize the relationship between Humanity and Nature and where we place the blame for the ecological degradation that has come to define this relationship. 

Moore argues that the Anthropocene as an explanatory narrative is insufficient in articulating how we got to this moment of ecological crisis because it perpetuates the very binaries that underpinned the capitalist colonial project, and as a result is too reductive or incomplete an explanation. The narrative which the Anthropocene offers is one that sees Humanity acting upon Nature to the point of ecological crisis, conceiving Humanity and Nature as two separate parts of a whole. Yet the reality is much messier: humans are part of the web of life, and our institutions while being distinct from their environments are their product (if for no other reason than what Moore calls the ontological condition of geography). Further, the Anthropos to blame for the ecological crisis of this narrative is an undifferentiated monolith, a discourse that flies in the face of environmental research; as Moore puts it, “the rich and powerful create problems for all of us, then tell us we’re to blame.” The Anthropocene as explanation is insufficient because it fails to consider an important factor: Capital, and its role in reshaping ecologies. 

As the work of Moore shows, Capital was reshaping ecologies long before any Industrial Revolution or Nuclear Age. The colonial project itself can be understood as one of cataclysmic ecological restructuring, not merely as a result of a Cartesian revolution that redefined the relationship between Humanity and Nature, but as a result of resource exploitation in the colonies which led to large scale mining and deforestation. Colonialism in one sense can be understood as a project to expand the boundaries of the commodity frontier as a result of depleted resource bases back home, a process that was the result of the expansion of specific resource intensive industries, like metallurgy or potash production, often funded by powerful and monopolistic economic interests of the time. 

The thing to remember is that this process is not linear: capitalism doesn’t develop in a closed system, it is not the result of merely one set of circumstances. As mining, metallurgy, shipbuilding and other lumber intensive industries advanced, deforestation advanced in parallel as forests, in many cases the commons, were enclosed and made productive. This process of enclosure, whether economically or politically done, dispossessed the commons from those who had historically subsisted on them to the benefit of a minority elite, thereby creating a new working class necessary to sustain industrialization in urban centers. However, it isn’t just enclosure and vagrancy laws that are important conditions in the formation of this new working class; a series of agricultural revolutions during the long sixteenth century meant that less labor was necessary to produce higher agricultural yields, meaning more and more people had to rely on wage work to make a living as the long century progressed. 

Colonialism was not just the latest act of dispossession by Capital, it was also the latest reconfiguring of who was part of Humanity and what was considered productive work. The exclusion of Black and Indigenous populations from the category of Humanity justified their exploitation as cheap labor, and the devaluing of child labor and gendered work allowed the contribution of women and children to be devalued even as this labor was integral to the formation of capitalist industrial societies. The shift to a logic of Capital meant wealth was no longer measured by how productive land was, but how productive labor was even if so much of the work required in the maintenance of daily life had to be devalued as work.  

The logic of the Anthropocene reproduces the logic that underpins capitalism, for it too is predicated on the Cartesian binary of Humanity/Nature and the premise that Humanity inhabits Society and acts upon Nature (ignoring that Humanity, and by extension Society, are embedded in Nature and in one sense a product of it). This Cartesian logic allows capitalism to reduce the web of life into discrete systems to be managed and exploited, as well as a way of appropriating labor power from populations by reassignment from the category of Human to Nature. In this context racism and sexism (white supremacy and patriarchy) are not just a cultural necessity to divide the working class, but a structural requisite of capitalism to appropriate new sources of cheap labor by a fluid process of othering certain populations. This was after all the logic of chattel slavery, which justified itself morally by denying the humanity of the Slave (chattel, a synonym for personal property, shares etymological origin with cattle).

The Anthropocene as a deficient explanatory narrative of ecological crisis can be a case study for the limits of an environmentalism that does not take seriously the role of Capital (and its logic) in ecological degradation. And this is exactly the problem with green capitalism, and the neoliberal environmentalism it deploys in its quest for sustainable development and a decarbonized global economy. Ultimately, neoliberal environmental policies represent a new form of dispossession and an expanded accumulation frontier. Central to these policies is the belief that free trade and economic growth are not only compatible with environmental sustainability, but important preconditions for finding and deploying the most effective solutions to the current ecological crisis. The neoliberal solution to environmental problems is simply more efficient management of resource exploitation in accordance with natural limits, and the creation of market mechanisms (like cap and trade) to mediate access to ecosystem services and rights to pollute. 

Cap and trade is a two part system aimed at reducing greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere by placing a limit on the amount of their emission across an industry or economy and reducing that limit over time. The state sets these limits (or caps) for any given GHG in any given industry and enforces them by giving companies pollution allowances in the form of carbon credits in accordance with these limits and setting fines for violating these limits; companies that are able to limit emission below their allowances can then sell (or trade) their surplus carbon credits in a carbon market. In addition, companies can purchase carbon credits from clean development projects facilitated by the Clean Development Mechanism (or other voluntary markets with similar functions), a market for buying carbon offsets produced by these projects. 

Proponents of these market mechanisms believe the market will find the cheapest and most effective ways of cutting emissions. Yet there are numerous case studies that point to this combination of market mechanisms leading to new forms of dispossession and exacerbating environmental degradation instead of mitigating it, as in the case of a CDM biomass power generation project in Thailand that used rice husk as the raw material: 

While local industrial elites call this rice husk ‘waste,’ peasants in the area have been using it as natural fertilizer and for brick manufacturing for generations. However, now that profits can be made from burning the rice husk for electricity generation, creating ‘carbon credits’ that can be sold to Northern countries and companies, this renewable technology/ resource has become a valuable (overpriced) commodity. As a result, peasants now have to buy chemical fertilizers, which increase their cost base. This has an indirect impact on climate change, since the production of these fertilizers itself generates carbon emissions. Additionally […] there have been health (e.g. respiratory problems) and environmental hazards (e.g. dumping of waste ash) produced by this new ‘clean development’ project. 

In many cases CDM funding subsidises dirty industries in the Global South like coal-fired power plants, paper mills, and dam construction which increase net fossil fuel consumption, because Designated National Authorities (DNAs) neglect their duties as watchdogs. 

The problem with neoliberal environmental policy is that it is the result of a political economy that prioritizes maintaining a fossil fuel status quo over actually cutting GHG emissions, leading to ineffectual market mechanisms that far from actually cutting emissions merely create new avenues for profit from already existing dirty projects or dispossess people of land (including for carbon sinks, in a process eerily similar to enclosure) and resources. As Marxist academics have pointed out, including Moore, market mechanisms are “best understood as part of a trajectory of capitalist dynamics structuring human relations to the natural environment in specific ways, while producing and re-producing processes of inequality within and between countries.”

If Branson, a billionaire tycoon, in good faith failed to produce results, then it must be recognized that perhaps capitalism and free market fundamentalism have failed at solving the problem they produced. 

If neoliberal environmental politics cannot sufficiently green capitalism to the point of sustainability, that is if capitalism cannot sufficiently transform itself, surely it can transform technology, the planet or both to such a degree as to avert the worst of this ecological crisis? Consider the case study of airline tycoon Richard Branson offered by Naomi Klein: after an epiphany of the dangers of climate change was spurred by a meeting with Al Gore, he announced an initiative to develop green biofuel alternatives by diverting $3 billion of profits from Virgin’s transportation divisions towards their development. If the transportation divisions were not profitable enough profits would be diverted from all Virgin owned businesses. That wasn’t it though, a year after this pledge Branson announced the Virgin Earth Challenge, a competition with a $25 million prize for anyone that could invent a method of sequestering carbon from the atmosphere without harmful counter-effects. He also launched the Carbon War Room, a group of industry insiders looking for ways that polluting sectors can cut their emissions voluntarily and economically. The hope underpinning these initiatives was that the resulting technologies would allow for an unchanged political economy and culture of consumption, for businesses as usual to continue.

Seven years after his $3 billion pledge for biofuel development, that initial goal had already been diluted; Virgin Fuels became the Virgin Green Fund, a private equity firm invested in a diverse portfolio of green and green-ish technologies and one biofuel. The $3 billion pledge has become a $300 million gesture towards sustainability, as a result of profit shortfalls from his transportation divisions, profit shortfalls that did not however affect Virgin’s ability to expand its airline operations and put more carbon in the air. The Earth Prize remains unclaimed, as none of the thousands of applicants pitched technologies that could sequester carbon at the scale necessary while being financially viable and profitable. In time it too changed from an initiative to find viable carbon sequestering and storage technologies to an initiative to find carbon sequestering and recycling technologies that would transform sequestered carbon into a valuable commodity. This commodity can then be used as a source for carbon intensive methods of fossil fuel extraction, increasing the system wide output of GHG even if one aspect of that system sequesters carbon. 

A cynical analysis of this case study would lead one to conclude that these green initiatives on Branson’s part were just a way of managing PR as he prepared to expand his fossil fuel intensive operations at a time when climate scientists and advocates are calling for their wholesale reduction on a global scale. Even a more charitable analysis has to conclude that if Branson, a billionaire tycoon, undertook these initiatives in good faith and failed to produce results, then it must be recognized that perhaps capitalism and free market fundamentalism have failed at solving the problem they produced. 

Other technological fixes centered around large scale manipulations of earth systems, including ocean fertilization and multiple methods of Solar Radiation Management (SRM or sun dimming), are not mature enough to deploy safely. The idea that we can geoengineer our way out of this ecological crisis is an extension of the very logic that got us here: the belief that ecological systems can be managed efficiently and effectively, that we can bend them to our will. To think that we can change an aspect of the system without irrevocably changing it as a whole betrays our lack of understanding that the ecology is a dialectical system which responds in real time to our actions, it is not closed or static. Further, computer modeling shows that these SRM technologies under certain conditions (such as the release of sulfur into the upper atmosphere from locations in the northern hemisphere) could result in decreased rainfall in regions of Africa and Asia resulting in the collapse of their food systems and famine. 

Proponents of geoengineering argue that these models are not infallible especially when predicting regional outcomes, and so these negative externalities are not a given. But what this means is that institutions and individuals in the Global North are demanding that marginalized populations everywhere (but especially the Global South) bear the brunt of the consequences of large scale geoengineering even when we do not know what these consequences might be, all so that a relatively small proportion of the world population can keep accumulating wealth from unchecked fossil fuel consumption. In this light, geoengineering would constitute another iteration of the uneven development to be found in a capitalist world-ecology, and which is often racialized and gendered. In other words, the latest iteration of environmental racism.

On a material, day to day level, because life is short and singular, I don’t particularly care if the solution is green-Keynesian capitalism or communism that saves us.

Ultimately, the anti-racist struggle and the environmentalist struggle must become part of a broader coalition of intersectional struggles under an anti-capitalist banner. If the superstructure is classist, racist, sexist and any number of other -isms that can be used to describe it, it is so as a reflection of its function, which is to restructure the world-ecology from a web of interconnected and interdependent life into discrete categories for commodification. Nothing is exempt from capitalism’s appetite, and nothing is held in high enough esteem to abnegate this appetite.  

Of relevance, the state apparatus killing and incarcerating BIPOC disproportionately and violently repressing protesters is the same state apparatus violently repressing environmentalists and protecting the private property of extractive industries everywhere around the world. This is the same state apparatus that has become a node of rape culture. The same state apparatus that harrassses the homeless and enforces evictions against the working class. We must recognize that the power structure benefits from fragmenting our common struggle so that we cannot take aim at it for the common enemy that it is.  

We must engage in a project of transformative environmentalism. One which on an ideological level seeks to rearticulate our dualistic conception of nature and our relation to it into a more profound understanding that we are part of the ecology, not outside of it; and which on a material level seeks to dismantle the neoliberal institutions (and the policies they prescribe) created to simply manage natural resources for more sustainable exploitation enabled by this dualism, replacing it instead with a patchwork of local stakeholders engaged in the stewardship of whole ecosystems through a combination of traditional ecological knowledge and scientific knowledge. 

However, the scale of our environmentalism and our conception of what exactly constitutes environmentalist action must expand. If we understand capitalism for the world-ecology that it is we come to realize that to be environmentalist requires one to be anti-capitalist. In this context the most viable way out of our ecological quagmire, sustainable degrowth of the world economy, can be understood as environmentalist in nature. The emphasis of course is on sustainable, implying that this process of degrowth would not result in social regression or stagnation (as human progress would simply continue along a more holistic trajectory), or the negative externalities of the forced degrowth we have come to expect every time a bubble bursts, every time a boom goes bust. This means the way and amount in which we produce and consume commodities, and as a result the way we live, must change wholly. The good news, as Klein points out, is that in reconfiguring the way in which we live and sustain ourselves we can create a more equitable and just world in the process.

Imagine how much more resilient an economy in equilibrium with the web of life from which it emerges, and which prioritizes the health and quality of life of communities over wealth accumulation, would be in the face of the current global pandemic. The pandemic was a shock to the system that resulted in unsustainable degrowth of the economy as social distancing measures went into place to flatten the curve. But while the pandemic triggered a recession that greatly affected the working class, capitalism adds flames to the already roaring fire in the form of artificial scarcity (making the recent condemnation of looters in this context even more absurd).     

The neoliberal project of a techno-managerial, market based approach to solving the climate crisis has been a resounding failure; in fact, it can be argued has only made things worse. Deregulation, another neoliberal project funded by corporations involved in extractivist industries (the very corporations that similarly stand in the way of developing and promoting green energy infrastructure), has similarly proved disastrous for the environment. What’s more, philanthropic millionaires and billionaires will not save us, as they will always put their short-term corporate profits over the long-term wellbeing of our planetary systems, choosing to take token action for the sake of optics. Thus, it becomes apparent that to protect the environment we must adopt an anti-capitalist position that is truly environmentalist in the way it prioritizes the ecology over free-market fundamentalism.

On a material, day to day level, because life is short and singular, I don’t particularly care if the solution is green-Keynesian capitalism or communism that saves us. The reason I’m so anti-capitalist is that fundamentally capitalist political economy, predicated on continual expansion both as material requisite and as ideology of accumulation, is incompatible with the hard limits of reality and will always result in metabolic rifts that lead to crash-boom cycles, the big final crash always being kept at bay by ever more draconian economic policy and serendipitous technological shifts. Capitalism will always cannibalize itself, and devours us all in the process.

We would wake up before the sun had risen, when it was dark and still outside. In rideshares we would speed through empty streets and witness the city gradually awaken. Sometimes we would arrive at our destination and the sky would still be dark, other times the sky would look like blue alabaster as the sun rose behind a skyline unfettered by physics and building codes. The places we would photograph included flower markets, fruit markets, fish markets, near mosques and temples, any locus of human activity. 

The flower markets were fragrant, the scent of flowers commingling with the smell of car exhaust and perspiration. They were arranged into mounds by type, the loose blossoms ready to be strung. By daybreak the ground was transformed by miniature dunes of various colors, each a different pile of flowers. 

The fruit and vegetable market consisted of a street which had been taken over by vendors who piled their produce along the sidewalk and into the street. The scene was a frenzy of human activity. We went from the bright, crowded streets to the dark, dank interior of the fish market. The wet pavement and glistening fish reflected glints of outside light. Fishmongers counted their money.  We walked slowly and carefully trying not to slip on the wet pavement while avoiding puddles of grey water and blood, and the occasional cat scurrying past our feet. 

As we walked, weaving and bobbing through the crowds of people, we shot at a steady clip. I was shooting digital on a ILCE-7SM2 and film on a Mamiya RB67 Pro SD. Any time I shot with the RB67 I would slow down. Because I was shooting without a light meter I would check my exposure beforehand with the 7SM2 (or my companion, Antonio, would check for me with his own camera). It wasn’t a perfect method, but the format, and in particular the film I was shooting, provided enough latitude that I knew I could be over or underexposed by two stops and still capture a usable image. Given how cumbersome the camera was and how precious few rolls there were, I would only pull out the RB67 sporadically and always with clear intention. I would check my exposure with the 7SM2, frame my subject through the waistfinder of the RB67 and stand still, my neck craned over the waistfinder, until my subject was in position, the slap of the mirror punctuating the release of the shutter. Sometimes I would take a second shot for safety, but usually not. 

In Varanasi we walked down to the river and walked along its banks from ghat to ghat, first in one direction then the other. At sunset we hired a boat to take us on the river. Once night had completely fallen the river around Dasaswamedh Ghat turned into a floating stadium as boats crowded along the river bank to witness the Ganga Aarti.  

(As I write, I try to remember details that I only now realize never took the time to remember, and I have to wonder if my shortcomings as an artist lie in the possibility that those may have been the details worth remembering.) 

The camera’s gaze isolates everyday moments and in so selecting elevates the banal, recontextualizing and rearranging life into art as it passes through the proscenium of the frame. But the act of taking a photograph is a selfish one, particularly as an anonymous photographer. I steal a moment or a face for no other reason than my own libidinal desire. And given my anonymity I narrativize the photograph based on whatever set of values and standards I’ve internalized and assimilated, with no institution or individual intervening on behalf of context or objectivity. 

I give nothing back to my subject, not in a material sense at least. There exits a momentary solidarity between the subject and I during the process of taking a photograph. The creative act in some inexplicable sense renews what little faith I have that the world will someday make sense. Yet I walk away with more than a renewed sense of well being, for my subject has left me with a photograph, the accumulation of which amounts to a body of work. I pluck a stranger from the slipstream of quotidian life, in some cases a more brutal life than my own, only to toss them back into that slipstream when I am satisfied like a fisherman who catches a fish only to release it. From the perspective of the fish this constitutes a brutal and inexplicable interruption of daily life, even if the fisherman perceives the proceedings to be harmless and humane.   

Did I capture a slice of life? Did I capture a story or merely a set of cultural signifiers that satisfy a vague and nebulous desire for decontextualized exoticism?  

Whose story am I telling through these images if not my own, and only my own. In many ways a story of privilege: the privilege of an American passport, the privilege of debt, the many socio-cultural privileges that as a cis-, hetero-, able-, neuro typical male make certain aspects of daily life, an by extension travel, easier. 

But I am also a POC, I am working class, my parents are immigrants; sometimes just being in a place with few faces resembling my own feels like a kind of victory, a kind of resistance by taking up space in a world that would rather I sink into the background.

At dinner with some friends, an older couple visiting from Los Angeles, the conversation becomes about travel. When we tell them our plan to visit India Adam tells us his brother currently resides in Delhi. His brother is, by their account, something of an eccentric savant, the black sheep of the family.

 Later, when we are asked about having children I confess that I am an antinatalist. As I explain what that means, Adam looks at us incredulously, with a hint of involuntary disgust, the kind of expression that arises when one is witness to the violation of a natural law. Recognition flashes across his face as he comes to understand we share the same madness that afflicts his brother, Black Philip. Of course from where I am seated they’re the mad ones, slaving away for the mere pleasure of consumption, for the relative safety of conformity; the American Dream.  

I have poor financial planning skills according to some. I’m inclined to agree with them. Given that I am not likely to ascend very far socio-economically over a lifetime whatever my effort may be, I see no reason to forgo travel. It requires a shift in priorities that can be summed up as a process of narrowing our consumption to include only those things which improve your quality of life in a meaningful, material way. What this means and looks like is different for everyone. This is not to say that as I grow older, and the future looks ever more bleak, that I do not worry about my financial security, but it isn’t my sole preoccupation (call it myopic). 

I saw this trip as an investment in myself, both generally as an individual and specifically as an artist. It was an investment that would pay dividends in experience, as I was forced to push at the edges of myself.  A blitzkrieg of growth and, thus, creative output. I was as excited for the discomforts that lay ahead as I was for the indulgences, as I conceived novelty and discomfort as vectors for this growth. What I did not consider at the time was the dichotomy of circumstance that made this possible (and which I was exploiting), for I admit that the most exciting aspect of the trip was the inevitable return. Always in the back of my mind was the thought that no matter how bad it got all I must do was endure my misfortunes before the aeroplane over the sea carried me back to a life of order and cleanliness (as if American metropolises are not themselves overcrowded, environmentally degraded and lacking in social services). 

When we took to the crowded streets of Old Delhi or Varanasi we bore witness to the way cities seem to shrink or expand depending on the time of day, the way the crowds move in a kind of syncopated unison that simply swallows you if you allow it, the delicate dance between pedestrian and driver which collapses delineations of sidewalk and street into the single, medieval category of road. Human activity so concentrated that you are confronted with the seeming chaos of tides so numerous and individual as to constitute a flood, like so many intersecting lines which to the naked eye appear to be only a knot. And it was here as we navigated through the crowd, stepping into traffic wherever the sidewalk narrowed, reaching out to touch a passing bus the way a child reaches for the chain link fence as they rush by, stray dogs scampering between legs and around beggars who altered the flow of pedestrian traffic around them like monoliths of stone alter the flow of rivers, it was here that we realized there is an order to this chaos, but that which imposes this order is life’s tendency towards survival not society’s tendency towards stringency.

We were more than happy to go on these excursions through the city because we knew that an oasis from all this human misery was awaiting us in the form of one or another American hotel chain or air conditioned home stay. This was Indian life experienced in fits and burst, interrupted by Uber rides and room service, and therefore incomplete.

In the gardens of Mehtab Bagh, as we looked for a way down to the riverbank without alerting the solitary guard, we were approached by a group of boys who wanted their picture taken. We spoke to them, took their portraits and showed them what they looked like before we carried on and were again approached by a man and two adolescents, one younger than the other.  They too wanted a picture, but this time they wanted a selfie with us in the frame. I obliged as I could think of no reason not to, and in exchange I asked that they let me take their portrait. We shook hands and thanked each other before parting ways.

As we continued to wander the periphery of the gardens we realized that even if we found a way through to the other side, the boys from before were following us and in turn a guard was following them. 

The boys seemed tirelessly fascinated with us, asking questions about our lives and volunteering bits about their own. They asked me to show them the camera gear I had with me, and one of them took a couple of out of focus portraits of me. All the while the guard followed from a distance, far enough to give us privacy yet close enough to alert us of his presence. It was only once we had circumnavigated the entirety of the gardens and were once again in the center of the garden, close to the parapet separating us from the riverbanks below and the Taj across the Yamuna, that he approached us, as did an older man who a moment earlier had been stretching under a citrus tree like a runner preparing for a race. He too wanted to meet us and take a few pictures with us. We learned that he used to be the head of the Agra police force, but was now retired.

 When we left them under the citrus tree the boys again trailed behind us. The retired chief of police yelled something to the kids who in turn turned around and yelled something back. After their short back and forth I slowed down and asked the kids what they had been told, although I had an inkling despite the language barrier. One of them, the one that seemed to lead the group, struggled to find the words as he indignantly explained that the retired chief had warned them not to bother us. “But we are good boys. We go to school,” he said. 

Reactions to my photo taking fell along a spectrum between emphatic desire to participate and a disinterested handwave away, most simply carried on. Though rare, there were moments when I felt unwelcome, as if I was intruding like a character who had wandered from a different stage and was now reciting lines incongruent with the plot. It only occurs to me now that perhaps the increasing rarity of these occasions was the result of my growing hubris, and not simply evidence that I was fastidiously learning how to lose myself into the background of life. When I look back it is clear that I was never going to master the art of being incognito, and to ever think I could do anything but standout was clear evidence of my naïveté. 

As I walked the streets of New Delhi or Kolkata it is true that I was invisible, that people paid me no more attention than they did the many stray dogs, that they walked by carrying their loads in their arms or on their heads without so much as a glance in my direction. It is true that as I moved through the crowds I was invisible, until I was not. I was invisible until someone wanted their picture taken, bearing witness to the lie that I was ever invisible in the first place.

I am a tourist; although I strive to avoid the label it is unavoidable. The travel industry employs “influencers” who sell would-be travelers the idea that the shift from tourist to local is merely a question of authentic experience or sometimes just authenticity and experience.

To call myself a global citizen would be to white wash the relentless march of imperialism where we go out into the world and make our identities and values ubiquitous, imposing them not by force but by our dollar in a manner no less violent than armed invasion. 

Nation states have to invest in the industries and push the cultural narratives that best prop up their tourism, doing so in economically opportunistic ways that appeal to the tastes of global capitalism. 

Take for instance the Day of the Dead parade held in Mexico City, now a yearly tradition. A “tradition” that has its origins as background spectacle for the opening of Bond flick Spectre. A “tradition” borne out of the opportunistic fetishization and commodification of Mexican culture by global capitalism: they have taken something from our culture, bastardized an aspect of it and sold it back to us. The irony of the Catrina, a revolutionary figure defanged by recontextualization as mere costume, is not lost on me. 

Some might argue that cultural expression is cultural expression, whether in the context of some mythic folk purism or state-sponsored spectacle. Of course this wouldn’t be the first time capitalism births a beloved tradition as a marketing ploy. And it would be dishonest to paint the event with one brush, for whatever its origins the parade has been a vector for symbolic political expression.

However, symbolic acts of solidarity by the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie on a platform meant to encourage international tourism and not advocate revolution is not enough to uplift the working class in materially meaningful ways. Merely encouraging tourism is not enough. Even if you argue that increased tourism leads to increased economic opportunities, the distribution of these economic opportunities is not uniform being that the Mexican working class is itself not a monolith (no working class is) and being that many times these economic opportunities are exploited by corporate interests. These corporate chains provide employment, but what good is employment when wages do not keep pace with the cost of living. 

The question of who has access to the burgeoning economic opportunities that a tourism industry at scale can provide is compounded by the fact that it is usually the poor and working class who have to bear the worst effects when the growth of tourism outpaces the growth and maintenance of vital infrastructure and social services. Tulum is an example of this: a lot of tourism dollars go into the pockets of foreign expatriates who have set up expensive yoga retreats and plant-based restaurants, crowding the coast around the booming beach town and taxing its infrastructure.

This isn’t to say travel should not be undertaken, but we should ask who get to travel where, how and why? The identity of the world traveler, the global citizen, is not available to every human on this planet, it is not available even to most.  

On one of our last days in New Delhi we headed for the Red Fort only to find it was closing as we arrived. The evening was still hot and bright so we decided to walk around. We found ourselves in a park behind the ruins. 

There I took the portraits of some kids who approached us with baby goats. After, they demanded money which I gave to them out of guilt, and which they took to some adult figures under a tree who had been watching from a distance. The oldest one had a look in his eyes of someone much older and wearier, and looking into them I experienced an uncanny valley for his face was that of a child’s but his eyes were not. The younger ones were more shy though they approached with curiosity nevertheless. 

I continued photographing kids during the duration of my trip, some at their behest and some at the behest of the parents. None asked me for payment after this, and for better or worse, none had the same weary look. 

But the people I remember most vividly are not those I photographed, but those I did not: the guard at the building where our final home stay was, the woman that followed us for a city block with her hand outstretched, the baby craddled between his parents as they slept on the sidewalk on a cardboard flat. We walked past them carrying bags laden with groceries from the shopping center down the street: the one with the designer stores, with the cinema and two levels of restaurants, with the underground supermarket, and the bus stops with the benches where people slept underneath, who we also passed and did not photograph. 

I started to consider the reasons for why I photographed what I photographed, began to question why I photographed anything at all. I tell myself that all I am doing is finding and documenting human stories, even when photographing a landscape or still life. The implication there is of neutrality, but couched within the process of documentation is the act of selecting, and with it all the inherent bias and prejudice of taste. The matter of unpacking my taste is complicated since it is a complex of aesthetic preferences mediated by subconscious, and therefore seemingly unrelated, ontological biases and prejudice. Who or what I choose to photograph is not merely a matter of color, form, symmetry or quality of light, for photography’s democratic approach towards subject matter has shown that any subject viewed from the right perspective can posses one or all of these photogenic qualities. That which dictates what a photographer will photograph is also that which dictates who they will vote for president or the contents of their suicide note. 

In her critical assessment of Diane Arbus’ work, Susan Sontag writes, “Photographing an appalling underworld (and a desolate, plastic overworld), [Arbus] had no intentions of entering into the horror experienced by the denizens of those worlds. Her view is always from the outside.” When I reflect on this I realize it applies to my own work, at least that undertaken in India. Sontag points out that although Arbus was drawn to photographing the ugly and the maimed her subjects were ahistorical and apolitical, she “was not interested in ethical journalism.” 

Others who write of Arbus’ photography tend to read a kind of empathy in her work (which Sontag seems to believe is absent in the images themselves), seemingly in accordance with the progresssive assumption that representation is itself a political victory. To the working class however, this makes no difference for this representation is almost always sanitized, tokenized and removed from their struggle. Sontag makes neat work of Arbus, reducing her body of work to that of a voyeur, a tourist of the human ghetto motivated by boredom and fascination. 

My own privilege extends just far enough that the sight of that child sleeping on the sidewalk sent me reeling into a long night of drinking and commiserating about the state of things. I suspect that what put me in a melancholic mood was not merely the sight of the child’s suffering, but my own guilt at doing nothing.

Sontag’s essay on Arbus and her photography has become a Rosetta Stone for understanding my experiences while traveling through India. When I think back to my conversation with Adam and Barbie, think back to my response when asked why, I wonder if my desire for growth, for pushing at the edges of myself as I put it, is not merely the same impulse as Arbus’ to “violate her innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged.” 

A new genre of content is being pioneered on YouTube. These videos follow a similar rubric: a white, male foreigner walking through the slums of Mumbai or the heart of Old Delhi with a camera trained on himself as he walks through the streets affably interacting with the locals. The titles to these videos include “Would you dare ride on this Indian bus?” and “India’s worst Street.” I have to contend with the possibility that the only distinction between them and I is my pretension.  

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I’m an atheist. If I’m being honest I’m a pessimistic agnostic who can only imagine a monist conception of god if forced to imagine god at all. To many this might imply a lack of faith, but they don’t know I shoot film. 

I began by setting up the seamless paper background on two stands, although as I write this I realize I had begun weeks before when I moved all the furniture in the room against the walls for unrelated reasons and thus cleared up the space necessary to later set up my makeshift studio. And if I’m being honest in my deconstruction of this process I’d find that it started much earlier than that, when all is said and done I might be able to push the beginning as far back as my birth, after all if the art I produce and the artist I become are the result of a dynamic system extremely sensitive to initial conditions it all begins with birth. I am nothing more than a conduit for experience and my art is ultimately an amalgam of these experiences, and this produces some anxiety in me for I realize that whatever my work says about my subjects it says tenfold more about me. 

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I was slow and methodical in setting up my work area. I took great pleasure in sliding the roll of paper from inside the box it came in and onto the stands’ supporting rod. I worked in silence while Heather got ready in the next room. Once the background was set up all that was left to begin was to load a roll of film into the Yashica. 

I loaded the roll of film into the camera with the nervous austerity I expect from the hapless bastard who must load a single bullet into a six-shooter and spin that roulette. With a roll of twelve my odds would appear twice as good, except that each and every one of those shots might be my ruin; there are no blanks. 

Although loading a roll of film into a camera and the anticipation that accompanies this act produces a psychological analogue to the gut-wrenching fear and anxiety of preparing for a game of russian roulette, the analogy is flawed. First, it is not at my own head that I aim the barrel of my lens, but at others and so I fear for them as much as I fear for myself. Second, while the function of the apparatus is the question which produces anxiety in both instances, in russian roulette the hope is that the firing mechanism will align with an empty chamber or jam if it doesn’t, while in film photography you hope for the opposite outcome, and ultimately walk away physically unscathed regardless of that outcome. 

As much as shooting a roll of film feels like a reckoning with my mortality, the stakes are not as high in a material sense, after all how can a wasted roll of film compare to a life lost? Sontag claimed all photographs are memento morí, and this is perhaps true of those photographs which technically speaking are well exposed and clearly representational. But in a way loading and shooting a roll of film feels like a personal memento morí, one that encompasses my work as well as my life, for each wasted frame is a reminder that the body of work I leave behind is simply an accumulation of mistakes, failed attempts and loss. And as someone who aspires to the title of artist, who already conflates their self with the identity of artist, I have conflated in the act of taking a photograph my literal mortality with the fear of being forgotten. Mediocrity is a worse fate than true ineptitude, if only because the latter is celebrated and remembered while the former fades into obscurity without much pomp or circumstance. Truly abysmal work is its own spectacle, as midnight screenings across the country of The Room or Troll 2 can attest. 

There was a palpable tension in the room that seemed to prop up the proceedings like a dark matter lattice. I felt like the act I was about to perform required a superhuman amount of concentration, required the focus of a brain surgeon or sicario (which amounts to the same thing in some cases) and so I worked as slowly shooting my roll as I had worked to set up. There occurred in this process a transference, my burden of utmost concentration became my subject’s. She would strike a pose and hold it with the unnerving stillness of street performers who paint themselves bronze or silver and play at being statues. The strain didn’t register on film, but we developed a rhythm like novice freedivers, exhaling deeply between shots and gasping for air before the next. The light changed very little as the hours passed, but the room became warmer and more humid. My focus was such that as I looked down through the waistfinder trying to frame the shot while accounting for parallax, I could feel my forehead perspire and a thin film of sweat form. My subject remained poised, even as the tension increased with my own frustration at the idiosyncrasies of the twin lens system. 

There was a sense of relief when I shot the final frame of that first roll. The entire room exhaled. I questioned whether or not to shoot another roll: I was sure that I had loaded the film wrong so I wanted to shoot another roll for safety, especially because I still had an hour left of good light and it made no sense to postpone for another day when I’d have to rearrange the furniture and set everything up again. But I wasn’t sure I could ask that of my model, though I knew she’d be willing. To submit to my vision was to submit to a tyrant. 

I loaded the second roll of film as carefully as the first (the act of loading a revolver is simple relative to loading a camera, even though the stakes are higher), and yet there was less severity to the act this time around. In fact the entire process went imperceptibly better. I hardly looked up from the waistfinder as I moved from side to side around my subject, looking for the best angle, winding the crank not like a revolver but a gatling gun, each frame fired in relative quick succession. It took me half as much time to shoot the second roll as it did the first: this roll was for safety, and yet shooting that first roll allowed me to work in a less calculated manner. I was glad I had decided to shoot that second roll, the act had proven itself a kind of intermezzo. 

After it was all said and done I took down the seamless paper and the stands, I rearranged the furniture and put the twin lens cap back on the Yashica. In a way it is the closest analogue to the experience of conception available to me, the negative safely spooled in the belly of the camera exposed but unknown. That which is conceived a product of the seeming indeterminism of my creativity (and the free will I think implied) and the hard determinism of photochemistry. The fruit of my labor is not my own, at least momentarily when I entrust another to extricate my composition from the unexposed emulsion, entrust them to safeguard the integrity of that moment from the process which brings it into being, for even in a photograph time is not fixed. The negative emerges wet from the tray: an object representative of my creative will. 

As is so often the case in nature, the end of one process simply marks the beginning of another. Once the negatives are in my possession the process of selection begins, and so too does the process of reverse engineering those unintentional mistakes and serendipitous successes.

At our feet lay a people’s history. The sprawl of the city became the sprawl of the flea market as we walked down 39th from Midtown towards the Hudson River. The street was lined with tables, racks, crates and piles of clothes, records, postcards, photos, forgotten mementos and souvenirs to places that no longer exist. Every so often you might come across a table strewn with camera bodies and lenses, mostly old Nikon and Olympus bodies, the odd Minolta lens among the more numerous Rokinon glass, a digital point-and-shoot, true obsolescence among forgotten formats and of course one or two TLRs (none of them bearing the Rollei or Mamiya name, or even the Yashica or Minolta name). 

As I rummaged through this tabletop boneyard I noticed someone staring at me from a few feet away.  He was skinny, enough that his clothes hung loosely on his slight frame, shaved head, nondescript tattoos, he might have been wearing glasses, but he was definitely carrying a black tote bag. I can’t say I remember what shoes he was wearing, only that he wore shoes, only that he smiled, only that he spoke first as I inspected a camera, what make or model I cannot remember. I haven’t found much, what about you? Or something to that effect. Nah, no luck. He asked me if I was looking for anything specific. I told him a TLR, though nothing specifically. To resell or personal use? Personal use, I responded as I continued to move between tables of knick-knacks. He recommended I look into Yashicas. You can find them pretty cheap, but they’re quality builds. I acknowledged his recommendation with a nod as we moved further apart. (Goodbye stranger, yung deus ex machina.)    

At this point in time (April of last year) I had very little working knowledge of TLRs. All I knew was that I wanted to shoot medium format portraits and TLRs were the best bang for my buck, a perfect mediation of quality, price and technological accessibility for a novice. This is as true as any generalization is wont to be, but it was true enough as to suggest a starting point within medium format. 

I became enamoured with the Twin Lens Reflex the first time I saw the world mirrored in the ground glass, and even as I peered through the clouded viewfinder I felt like Celidonius. To see in a new way is to see for the first time again.  I’d like to pretend this love affair was devoid of fetish, but an entire genre of photography exists on social media to fetishize the waist-level viewfinder of TLRs and other medium format cameras. Yet this can hardly do justice to the experience of holding a camera at waist level and looking at the world through the ground glass, eyes shifting back and forth between the viewfinder and the scene before the camera.  

The work produced by a medium format camera bears only the faintest trace of the auratic quality of the technology itself: in technical terms we understand that the larger negative of medium format allows for a greater dynamic range, depth of field and resolution, but these differences are best appreciated by looking through the viewfinder instead of a zine or photo book. When the only thing between the world and me is the ground glass of a TLR, the camera introduces a reality of slightly different dimensions than the one that stands before the lens or the one perceived by me behind the camera; while the image printed after the fact, divorced from these two points of reference which the camera enjoys, offers only the final mediated version of reality. 

The auratic qualities of art are diminished by its technological reproducibility, according to Walter Benjamin who was particularly interested in photography and film in this regard. I am less interested in challenging Benjamin’s definition of art (indeed as he himself was less interested in articulating a definition of art than in articulating its function in contemporary society) than in articulating the way in which the auratic qualities of any media are omnipresent for the artist if not the consumer of their art. 

For a novice selecting a camera is an existential crisis. This crisis only intensifies with time and a little knowledge, just enough that, like Socrates, the only thing revealed is the depth of the photographer’s ignorance. There is a permanence to the decision  in the mind of the novice such as we conceive when we are children choosing a career or occupation; a predicament akin to, borrowing from a childhood favorite, choosing a starter Pokemon.   

In selecting a camera and format the novice photographer is choosing out of a myriad directions the one that they will take. Yet the novice status of the photographer implies a lack of direction, and worse yet no intuition as to which way to go. Like the rest of us who resort to acts of bad faith in the face of daily existential crises, the novice photographer might continually surrender to the facticity of this status and believe the kind of spooks in the psychology of consumption which give rise to commodity fetishism and brand identification. 

Leica is perhaps the ne plus ultra of commodity fetishim within photography. This subject deserves its own essay, but here I bring it up only to illustrate the kind of spooks which the novice photographer must assimilate or reject. For the history of Leica is immaterial and imaginary, and the assumptions that this history produces are merely that: assumptions of continuity, assumptions of innovation and assumptions of quality. The immutable core of Leica is nothing more than a set of standards and operating procedures. The material moving parts themselves are like the planks of Theseus’ ship, although Leica loyalists would appeal to the historical imaginary of Leica, like the many years the factory stood in Wetzlar until it was relocated in 1986 when the company changed its name from Leitz, to prove continuity.

 Of course Leica is but one example, the Canon and Nikon names are similarly mythologized. Again, this subject deserves its own essay, but I must admit that as a novice photographer I too acted in bad faith when I bought my first camera solely on the reputation of the brand. It was a fine camera, as Nikon builds tend to be, but it did not fit me and my ambitions well, and so I only used it a handful of times, enough to realize my mistake. And even this may have been an act of bad faith, wherein I told myself the limits to my photographic expression were the result of the limits of my tools and not the limits of my own creativity and expertise. 

I remember an evening on the John Muir Trail photographing Half Dome as the sun was setting with two friends, both fellow photographers. Justen, who by this point had been a photographer much longer than Tony or myself, was teasing us as we frantically made increasingly minute adjustments between each picture. For the uninitiated it must have looked like two madmen waltzing with ghosts, the ghosts of what we saw but was not there and could not be captured. Is it perfect yet? It wasn’t, it would never be, but we waltzed on until the veil of alpenglow was lifted from the granite by darkness. I realize now what I didn’t then, as intuitive as this should be: we falter before we stand and stumble before we walk, all learning is a process. 

I kept this in mind when I decided to begin shooting medium format. It has been at least as many years since I last shot, developed and printed my own black and white film as it has been since I started shooting digital. For all intents and purposes I am learning to work with film for the first time again, both because color film requires a different process and because it has been so long since I worked with any film. From the beginning I have conceived of this endeavor as a long term  process with many phases, allowing space and time for the eventualities I cannot predict along the way, especially those that arise from my inexperience. 

Conceiving of photography this way has diminished the anxiety which arises from the gap between my creative ambition and my inexperience. I realize now that my fate as a medium format photographer is not tied to the Yashica Mat 124G, or the Pentax 67 that one day will replace it for even that camera will be but an intermediary point in a much longer process. It isn’t that the old adage is wrong, only that we interpret it cynically in the context of professional photography which tends to fetishize specific technologies and turn process into dogma. The best camera is the one you have, if only because it will rarely be the same one every time you put viewfinder to eye.   

Of course once you have chosen the format you want to shoot, once you have chosen the make and model, there is still the question of selecting the camera that will be yours, out of the vast array of cameras in circulation. If you are purchasing new this is not an issue, but if the make and model chosen is out of production or otherwise purchasing new is cost prohibitive this presents yet another crossroads, this one of seemingly Borgesian proportions (for it is, in a sense, like staring into the abyss of time, trying to count a subset of its stars).  

We refer to the primary component of the camera as the body, and this term provides an analogue for understanding the way in which the passage of time becomes manifest in the body and transmogrifies it, for we need only regard our own bodies to understand that the language of existence is entropy. To be is to decay, and we all decay differently, so that two cameras of the same make and model, off the same factory floor, part of the same batch, once in possession of the consumer (or before that, if we are being honest) become wholly different. 

Purchasing a used camera is an act of trust. To do so you must learn a new language, and all of its dialects. Each major camera vendor and reseller has its own scale to communicate the condition of the photographic equipment being sold to the consumer. As much as any one scale attempts to create a standard, it cannot eliminate human subjectivity from the process of judging the condition of an item, it can only reduce and concentrate this subjectivity on a set of standards arbitrarily selected from a continuum between mint condition and salvage. The subjectivity which it is trying to mitigate is the same which gave birth to it as a system of signification. 

It is only at both ends of this spectrum that one finds objectivity, for the subjective points between either extreme are defined by their proximity to one or the other and as such these values must be fixed. These values are not objective because they are fixed, rather they are fixed because their objectivity can easily be verified: mint condition means one and one thing only regardless of the assessor, and this is similarly true for equipment broken beyond repair and only suitable for parts. 

I ultimately decided to pay top dollar for a near mint condition Yashica Mat 124g from a Japanese camera vendor, though the consensus seems to be that reasonably working cameras can be had for a third less if you’re willing to settle for something a little rough around the edges. It wasn’t just that I wanted an unambiguous guarantee as to the condition of the camera. Yashica halted production of this camera in 1986, and ceased production altogether in 2005 (at the time it was owned by Kyocera Corporation). Maintenance and repairs are expensive and require specialized knowledge and skill sets. While a flawless exterior does not guarantee intact innerworkings, the correlation is sufficient to offer me some peace of mind. At least until I can run a roll of film through it. 

At the moment I’ve selected a camera. This feels like enough, but it isn’t. It’s an expensive paperweight until I shoot a roll of film. But shooting my first roll of 120 color film will present its own crisis. Or rather a series of crises that sometimes occur in a linear fashion, like numbers on a frame counter, but more often seem to arise exponentially, each emerging crisis compounding the last. My hope, my suspicion, is that each crisis will chisel away at my inexperience, but my unspoken fear is that what will emerge from the crucible of this process will be a liar. I thought I wanted to take pretty pictures, but I just want them to be honest.