On Cameras: Why Not
I travel a lot. My parents were flight attendants, I grew up playing tag
with my little sister on 747s, I live in South America, and I sometimes
write guidebooks for Lonely Planet. Like I said, I travel a lot.

So I meet a lot of travellers, a lot of tourists, a lot of both. And 
always, always, always they carry a camera. No moment of interest or 
beauty can be allowed to pass by without a sudden patting and grasping 
of pockets.  

I remember once, at Ayer's Rock, now many years ago, I stood admiring 
the view, when a loud-mouthed Pom, pausing in mid-click, asked me where 
my camera was. I didn't have one, I said. What, no camera? Are you 
serious? You came to Ayer's Rock without a camera?  

This apparent lack on my part produced endless mirth for him and his 
friends. I had to walk away so I could concentrate on simply 
admiring the view.  

It seems to me that you can spend your vacation actually enjoying your 
holiday, or you can spend it as a film scout, always on the lookout for 
a "good shot", experiencing your trip, as it were, through the lens of a 
camera, instead of the moment-to-moment interaction of living your life.  

Our attitude toward our cameras and their ubiquitous popularity reveals 
a prominent neurosis of our Western-dominant world culture: we are 
afraid; deathly, deathly afraid. We are, culturally, a people of 
control freaks -- rather than enjoy the moment, and savour the 
bittersweet joy of its passing (for once it is gone there will be no 
other, and each moment is one moment closer to death), instead we want 
to capture life, stuff it into that silver box, pin it down, somehow 
put a stop to the passing of Time.  

It is a well-told tale that primitives, upon seeing photography for the 
first time, immediately objected that the box was trying to steal their 
souls. The ancient Greeks believed that to know a man's name was to gain 
power over him. There is a fundamental truth here that we too can 
perceive if we look inward into the primitive stuffs of which our souls 
are made -- that living is life and naming is death, and that both 
photography and history textbooks are little more than mementos for the 
dead: dead times, dead people, moments gone.  

The control freak traveller carries that little silver shield, that 
magic box, to ward off the unexpected, the unexplained, the frightfully 
new -- in short, life. Kill the scenery and master the memory, and do 
everything possible to block out the ineffable, the inexplicable, that 
is, the living moment, because to accept our powerlessness in the face 
of relentless Time is more than our technology-deluded, youth-obsessed 
culture can stand without going mad.  

We have sold our souls for tiny little shiny boxes, and wander the 
Earth, hungry for joy and wonder, but rather than fill our souls with 
the marvellous, succeed only in filling the memory card with the mundane.  
How ironic it is that at a time of greater travel, and freedom to travel, 
than at any other time in the history of humanity, there is both less to 
see than ever before and fewer people capable of seeing it.