Life Through a Lens

A camera is not, primarily, a way of recording the world. People who use it that way mostly produce records, which is to say documents of having been somewhere, and documents are a poor substitute for the looking that should have happened on the spot.

A camera is, if you let it be, a way of being instructed by the world — an instrument that requires you to slow down, to consider edges, to attend to what is at the foreground rather than what is at the postcard. Fifty years of holding one has, I think, taught me more about how to be in the world than any other practice I have undertaken, religious or otherwise.

The instruction is not that the world is beautiful. The instruction is that the world is beautiful only when looked at, and that looking is a discipline most adults have forgotten and a few children have not yet lost.