The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
~ Albert Camus

When I first learned how to use a camera, develop film, and make prints, I simply wanted to gobble up everything I saw. I named my camera “World Eater”. That was a long time ago,

Today, my approach to photography, while not as radical, still inclines toward improvisation. Wherever I am is a catalyst for what I shoot. Photography is the only medium I can think of that affords one the possibility to create this way, to instantaneously turn what is in our minds inside out. Sometimes, like junk DNA, these efforts don’t amount to much. Sometimes they reveal more about us than we’re willing to admit.

My series of camera songs, intentionally and by its very nature is a rickety, imperfect construct. Its photographs are of ordinary circumstances, taken with a point and shoot camera as I’ve gone about my days. There is an aura of impromptu playfulness and amateurishness about them. Only when assembled in pairs do its images begin to evidence some deeper intelligence at work, resonating like Camus’s chords playing over a background of white noise, searching for a melody. 

Such, as they say, is life.

In the undertaking of this series, then, I’m not unlike the example of the demented patient in Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus” whose doctor discovered him fishing in a bathtub and who then asked him if the fish were biting. “Of course not, you fool,” the patient replied, “this is just a bathtub.”  

In my case, the bathtub would be full of camera songs.

That said in the context of the 21st Century, the psychopathy of fishing in bathtubs seems to be in vogue, admired by the aspirational today as a profitable way to get ahead, especially if one is also selling bait and fishing poles.

To balance the scales, then, I’m reminded, as well, of another story, located at the other end of the absurdity spectrum. It is about a boy who was always so overly optimistic that his parents, to teach him about life’s inevitable disappointments, determined to give him a load of horse manure for Christmas – instead of the pony he had asked Santa for and was utterly convinced he was going to get. 

On Christmas day, the boy's parents woke to screams outside on their lawn where the manure had been dumped the night before. With sinking feelings, they made their way from their bedroom into their front yard, there to find their son feverishly digging through a massive pile of excrement with his bare hands, shouting, "I just know that there's a pony in here somewhere!”

Which brings us, at last, to the moral of this post: That instead of fishing in a bathtub that contains no fish, we might, rather, more beneficially spend our time digging through piles of fertilizer in search of some deeper meaning there. Therein, at least, resides the slim chance that fate might intervene one day and reward our efforts with a pony.