Date of publication: August 29, 1999
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Get your signed copy of The NEW Why Teams Don't Work by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers Just click on the book cover! A fully revised second edition of this award-winning classic by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley Paperback
Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995
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I just got my author's copies of a new book from Financial Times Management (London), MASTERS OF THE WIRED WORLD: Cyberspace Speaks Out.What's remarkable is that this collection of manifestos about the new age a'dawning contains proclamations by Tony Blair, Al Gore, Charles Handy, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur C. Clarke, Alvin Toffler ... and me.
I remember the first photograph I ever took. It was a black and white snap of a ham baking in our oven, through the grease-caked Pyrex oven window. The cloves in the glaze looked like worrying flies.
I was 10. I don't know what I was thinking. A still life? A Good Housekeeping cover?
I got the camera, an aqua-plastic Kodak Brownie, as a giveaway for families of General Motors employees. This was in Finney Chapel, Oberlin College, 1960.
In the intervening years, photography has been an on-again, off-again part of my life. But the ham in the oven window may have been the high point.
I like the way our immediate ancestors took pictures. Over the course of three generations they would accumulate maybe eight, mostly formal portraits.
Today we seem to undergo experience in order to photograph it, so that we will have a memory of that which we experienced. We crowd out the present with the business of setting up, focusing, shooting, and reloading, in order to ensure that the future is full of the past. We forget who we're working for.
Imagine that when we die we are greeted at the hereafter by a team of darkroom technicians who judge us not by our deeds and failings but by the number of slide carousels we have carted from the other life.
Rachel is the opposite. She dearly loves bringing them home alive, and cheerfully packs two camera bags when we vacation, one for 35mm stills and one for 8mm video. Most of our pictures are of us lugging the camera bags from one site to the next, where we can be photographed holding our camera bags.
Here's a snap of the "Observatory" at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. The building in the distance is a Mayan ceremonial center. The large fuzzy pink object in the foreground is my thumb.
She thinks I'm anti-picture because I communicate in words, and that I'm jealous of the directness and completeness and honesty of the photographic experience, which I have no hope of replicating in my writing. Preposterous - although I do prefer humble gear, like ten dollar throwaway cameras and digital cameras whose output is more suitable for journaling than framing.
One time, in a village on Guatemala's Caribbean coast, we wanted to paddle a dugout canoe provided by the owner of our pension. The owner told us it would be perfectly safe. The moment we sat, however, the boat sank like an anvil, soaking our cameras and all the film we had taken in the Peten jungle. The owner, standing at the dock said, "Oh, you wanted to get into it."
Photography can be embarrassing. Once, in a market in the mountain city of Chichicastenango, Rachel snapped a stall containing over a hundred remarkable masks, made of feather, beads, coconut shell and paint. They were the faces of spirits. The woman operating the stall immediately cried out, in Spanish: "You have stolen my faces!"
It was true. In a fraction of a second, we expropriated two years worth of work.
It's easy to get exasperated. Rachel will say, "Darn, I'm out of film," and we'll spend our half hour on the volcano's rim looking for a film shop. Or, if I have succeeded in getting her to leave the cameras in our cabin or car trunk just once, she'll say "Wouldn't this have made a great picture?" Note the verb tense.
But I will tap the side of my head and say "Click." Meaning I was taking a picture of everything with my infallible and indestructible memory.
It's a mean thing to say. And it's not even true. No memory is that good, particularly mine, and especially about the appearance of things. I believe that when we remember something, we merely remember our most recent memory of it. Each time we remember it the memory becomes a bit simpler, stupider, and uglier - a memory ten times removed. Our minds make shortcuts - shortening distances, crayonizing palettes, cartoonifying faces.
Whereas a picture retains its depth of field across years. Sometimes one of us will be moving boxes and come across a series of photos from long ago, and the pictures will take us far beyond memory's poor power.
Here's a print from the water-soaked roll of film. Note the main Temple at Tikal rising up above the other monuments. The fuzz on the margins is water damage.
Those pictures of the Peten jungle that were drowned did not drown completely. I took the film in anyway, and the strange, blurred images still speak to me about another civilization, glimpsed by strangers, underwater. Temples rising up through the salt water. Monkeys screeching from the tops of dissolving trees.
When I think of all the camera bags, chemical baths, and blank albums waiting to be filled, I groan. Does the future really need all this baggage from the past?
But then I spent an hour wading into the sea of images Rachel has walled away -- images of our children, of our travels, of the small rich life that has been ours. And so many prompt a smile, or an exclamation, or a sigh.
That ham will be forever warm.
To see Rachel's beautiful pictures of Guatemala and Mexico - none with us in them - go to http://mfinley.com/list-photos.htm
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Get your signed copy of The NEW Why Teams Don't Work by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers Just click on the book cover! A fully revised second edition of this award-winning classic by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley Paperback
Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995
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