Photographs

A friend gave me a very precious gift. In June, in Santa Rosa, I was given a Holga camera by a friend, who accepted in exchange a cheap pinhole camera made from a tea tin. I do not know how well the pinhole camera worked, but I now know the results from the Holga. My regret is that I neither knew its complete operation, nor its worth, until these photos, taken in Washington - mostly on the Olympic peninsula, with a few from Seattle.

Sometimes the images turn out quite sharp, and serve as touchstones of memory, as when I took this photo of a farmhouse outside the Quileute Reservation at sunrise. Operating as a dairy and a bed and breakfast, I knocked on the door, looking for something hot to drink. The first frost had just happened.

I met this man and his wife (below) who have the most incredible garden, full of strange statues and doors that lead nowhere over many acres. Many photos were taken in places too dark that they did not show up well. But here, when he entered a clearing, the light hit him well enough. I do not remember his name, but I recall he has Parkinson's so badly that he cannot use silverware but must only eat with his fingers. He does not care that the deer eat his plants. It is too big a garden anyway.

Though old, the woman is not feeble, and has many times circled the Earth with her husband, and a few without.

The dark lines and shadows give a prescience to each moment. I don't think that there is a meaning ascribed that was never there. But rather a meaning that becomes more visible once it is preserved.

I strive to catch the small moments of beauty that happen daily. Here, a spoon lodged in a fencepost. The camera has two settings, which I have only just learned today. One setting ensures a brief exposure of about 1/50th of a second. The other is manual and can expose for as long as the shutter is held open. Only learning this now, I realize why some photos of mine are too blurred and others so sharp as the settings went back and forth while the camera knocked around my pack.

Toy cameras, these are called. A Holga costs around $30 and is made only of plastic, including the lens. It weighs not even so much as a deck of cards and is the size of a small lunchbox. The setting for close-up shows a stick figure. Slightly further away, twist the lens till the hashmarks on top move from the stick man to the stick family. A bit further out, twist again till the gallery of stick people. One more twist and there are no more stick figures, but a stick mountain, for landscape shots, as the above. Cape Flattery, where the land just ends.

Sometimes, I forget to advance the film, and the result is a double exposure, as when a night shot of a hamburger shack overlapped with a self-portrait.

These shots lack the clarity of a glass-lensed camera. And they will never have the color-value of digital, though there are color films available. They are lurid dreamscapes, where the world is preserved not as it appeared, but as it felt to be.