Rudimentary Rules, or...On Photographic Imp-Propriety...

Today we drove a bit too far for a piano recital. (Ari was performing, while his sister frolicked in Pennsylvania with her girl scout troop.) The new recital hall had better illumination, and smaller dimensions. Some of the advanced students made the Steinway sing. Some of their parents made their digital cameras click, chirp, whirl, blink, and snap during the performances.

During such a moment this afternoon, one parent's point-and-shoot pocket camera emitted a disquieting barrage of mechanical burps and electronic flatulence as his son caressed an aria form the keys. My eyes darted around the room to asses the wave of presumptive dissent. Nothing. Instead the parent added an encore of Velcro squawks as he holstered. A minute later, he ripped Velcro and drew again. I watched from a few feet away, amazed as not one person in the audience interfered with the father-son duet de dissonance. Sontag came to mind. I bit my lip in an attempt to recapture the Steinway's serenade.

After arriving back home, I flipped through the pages of On Photography (1978). Skimming the pages, I re-read...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude...Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. Sontag, in typical eloquence, reminds the reader that photography is also aggression...a form of pixillated piracy.

But, that particular parent was not so much swashbuckling saboteur as perhaps a tunnel-visioned trophy hunter...brimming with pride as he scrolled through his coffer of pixels...surveying the images seized in mid-song...broadcasting his self-absorption in morse code...beep-beep beep-beep. I was able to steal a peak at one of the digitized doubloons. After all that cacophony, the camera managed to seize, an icon of banality.... The anguish of the moment was amplified by the inability of the parent's photograph to ensnare an emblem of the enchanting melodies.

Yet, as I bring attention to this afternoon's fallow-centric photography incident...that act of subterfuge, whether intentional or inadvertent, resonates. The impulse to posses a moment is intoxicating, and seductive. Some are seduced by pride in their progeny, some by an intangible aesthetic, others by greed, still others by a sense of entitlement. I am hoping that you enjoy this new blog, the pictures and the captions. However, if my impulse to possess a moment is rendered into a visual equivalent of mechanical burps and such...let me know.