05. The camera was a way in: on attention beyond photography

The day at the office had been one of those days. Too many open tabs, too many small problems, too many conversations that ended without resolving. By five o’clock I had stopped pretending I would finish anything, and I started the fifteen-minute walk home.

The afternoon the storm was coming

The weather was doing the thing it does here in late spring. The morning had been clear. By the afternoon the sky had thickened. The air felt heavier, the way it does before a storm. The wind had picked up enough to move the leaves of the trees along the street, and the light had turned a flat, silver-grey that made even ordinary buildings look like something you'd want to look at twice.

I was not carrying a camera. I had not been carrying one to the office for months.

About halfway home, my route cuts through a small park I have walked through hundreds of times. On a normal evening I cross it without noticing. It's the last quarter of the commute, the last few minutes before the door. But that afternoon, with the storm somewhere in the next district and the air doing what it was doing, I stopped.

I sat on one of the benches. I did not take out my phone.

What I noticed first was the way the sounds sorted themselves out. Leaves moving in different rhythms depending on the height of the three. A tram passing 2 streets over.

Then I noticed the bench. Initials carved badly into the back rest. The metal frame rusting at the base in a pattern I had never looked at before. None of it was interesting. All of it was there.

I sat for maybe four minutes. The air was holding still, the way it does just before weather changes, and I was holding still in it. Then I got up and walked the last five minutes home.

The camera was teaching me to do this all along

For a long time I thought I was a person who took photographs. That was the practice. The walks, the cameras, the years of looking. These were what I did to make pictures.

The afternoon on the bench, I understood it the other way around. The photographs were not what I had been making. They were what fell out of a kind of attention I had been quietly building, frame by frame, walk by walk, for as long as I had owned a camera. The pictures were the residue. The looking was the work.

The photographs were never the destination. They were how I knew I was practicing.

The afternoon on the bench did not happen because I am especially mindful or wise o in tune with the seaons. It happened because for twenty years I had been training myself, with a camera, to stop in front of ordinary things and look at them long enough to see what was there. The training did not stay in the camera. It crossed over. One day it sat me down on a bench in a small park in Łódź, with no camera in my hand, and let me hear how leaves move at different heights.

The shape of this attention

The kind of attention I am describing is not restful. It does not deliver peace and is not meant to. It frequently produces nothing. No photograph, no insight, no shift in mood. Most of the time you stop in front of an ordinary thing and look at it, and the ordinary thing remains ordinary, and you walk on.

The world is full of things that are simply there, holding their share of the day. To pay attention to them is to admit they are real.

The shape of this attention is the willingness to spend a few minutes of your finite life on something that will not reward you. The choice, again and again, to look at what is in front of you without first asking whether it deserves to be looked at.

Where the practice lives one

It shows up in places I would not have predicted.

On Sunday mornings I walk the dog at seven, before the city is properly awake. The streets that are loud on Tuesday are completely empty. The dog stops every few metres to investigate something, a stain on the pavement, the corner of a wall where another dog stood yesterday, and while he investigates, I wait. I have come to value those waits. They are minutes I would not otherwise spend looking at a doorway, a drain cover, the way one paving stone is slightly higher than the next.

The supermarket car park is the other one. After I park, before I get out, there is a small pause that has nothing in it. In that pause, I have started to notice things. The rust on the metal frame where the trolleys are chained together. The asphalt in front of my parking space, cracked in a shape I have looked at many times. The painted line for the bay, faded by years of rain and sun, no longer quite a line, more an idea of where a line used to be. A supermarket car park has no mood, no story, no romance. And yet there is something in standing in it for a moment before walking inside, paying it the same attention I would have paid a frame, that I think of as one of the more honest things I do in a week.

When this trilogy started, I was writing about photography. By the third post I was writing about a walk. Here, at the end, I am writing about a cark park outside a supermarket on a weekday afternoon. I do not think this is a contradiction. I think it is what happens when a practice doest what a practice is supposed to do, which is leak out of the activity it begain in and become a posture toward the rest of the day.

The camera was a way in. What it opens onto, once you walk through, is just your life.