DeCerteau "Walking in the City": Putting Down the Camera

De Certeau "Walking in the City": Putting Down the Camera

When reading Michel De Certeau's "Walking in the City," I was struck by how much the text spoke to an ongoing inner conflict that I've been experiencing as someone living in a foreign country. De Certeau discusses the difference between viewing a city from above and walking through the city. From above, one can see the city as a seemingly complete collection of its features. One can determine time of day, traffic patterns, pedestrian activity, relative location and distance of particular points, the layout of the streets, and so on and so forth. It would seem that, from a skyscraper, one can gather everything there is to know about a city. That is, until we come down from the observation deck. From the street, everything is louder, quite literally. You lack the big picture, but you gain detail. You can see different faces, the method in which people group themselves, verbal and nonverbal communication, whether time is moving quickly or slowly, and so on. The city from above and from the street are almost like alien planets, yet they are one and the same.

Living in Paris, my conflict isn't between my view from the streets and that from above. I'm not constantly at the top of the Eiffel Tower. In fact, the conflict is one that is so present in our lives we often don't even realize it's there: to photo, or not to photo. In many ways, taking a photo is a way of viewing Paris from above. From a photo, we get a sense of the state of the photographer's world at a segment in time in a particular segment of space. With the first photos, people believed that the truth was at last being accurately represented. Even today we can be moved by a photographer's ability transport us to a precise time and place. It is therefore easy to forget that when looking at a photo of Paris we are still just looking at the city from above. So how do we see Paris from the street? By putting down the camera. Like a bird's eye view, a photo is distorted. We have no third dimension nor sense of time. We also lack a sense of consciousness within the piece of time the photo represents. We lack our thoughts and emotions as well as the sensory information that we receive while simply viewing the world with the naked eye. Based on De Certeau's piece, it seems as if putting down the camera is the preferred option. As foreigner's in a new country, putting the camera away entirely is out of the question. But it is important to question whether the photos we take are worth ourselves being removed from the city. When do we snap, and when do we put it away?

1.

I grew up in a household where documentation via photos and video were extremely important. My mom once jokingly told me that if there was ever a house fire, I should try to save the cassette tapes (and, me being gullible, I believed her). Even now it seems as if she's afraid of forgetting the important moments in her family's life, and her photos are evidence of this.
One could look at the massive collection of photos at my house as a success, that my mother has certainly captured all the important moments. She need only to sit down and look at the photos to be transported to another time and place. Right?

To answer this question, let's consider the brain. Why is my mom so afraid of forgetting? We lose our memory with age, of course. But not in the way you'd think. Consider my mother twenty years from now trying to remember my 5th birthday, having forgotten many details. If her photo-taking paid off, she should simply be able look through her photographs and the memories should come rushing back. And that's how it would seem. My mother would probably begin telling the story of my 5th birthday and it would sound so complete that we probably wouldn't be able to tell that much of her story is false. Remarkably, our brains seem to have the capacity to make what's called "confabulation," or false memories. The brain doesn't like gaps in information. View a square that's missing corners and your brain will still interpret it as "square". Our memories work in a similar way. When memories are evoked, our brain activates similar pathways as when sensations (such as the smell of birthday candles or the color of the decor) were first analyzed. But from this we only get pieces of a memory and not a complete retelling. The brain must use previous knowledge and logic to try and make sense of everything. Typically, the confabulations aren't great enough for problems to arise. But problems do seem to increase in frequency and severity with age. Old or young, we are limited by the pieces of memory our brain holds onto when looking at a photo. No photo is powerful enough to truly present a complete, accurate memory.

It is in this way that photos distort the truth. Try looking at a photo you took that's at least five years old. What is it missing? What elements of the photograph seem false? How much of the memories coming back to you are true and not confabulation? The more we meditate on such questions, the smaller the scope of our photo, our bird' eye view becomes. Does that mean we stop taking photos? Certainly not. But the merit of photo-taking become a lot less urgent.

2.

So what do we miss in the short time it takes to take the photo? It can't be much, right?

To answer this question, I bring to the table a bit of my own spiritual philosophy: Buddhism. Buddhism teaches the importance of mindfulness, a state of consciousness rooted in the present. If you've ever taken yoga or meditated, you have practiced mindfulness. As conscious beings, our thoughts can be of the past, present, or future. When our thoughts are in the past, they are distorted by memory. Our brain plays tricks on us and confabulates. When our thoughts are in the future, they are distorted by lack of knowledge. No one can contemplate the future with accuracy. Thus, our thoughts are purest when they reflect the present. So what happens when we stop to take a photo? We are no longer experiencing the present moment. We are preoccupied with how the photo will look, who will like it, whether it will help us recall, etc. In the time we take to think about the future, we have missed the present experience of the moment we have just attempted to capture. The photo we are left with is of a moment we have missed entirely. Wondering what's missing from your photo? It's the experience of what the photo represents. You can't get the present back, so it's best to maximize your time with it. Not even Buddhist monks can be in the present all the time. What's important is to understand the value of being mindful, and to consider the necessity of stepping outside of the moment.

This is what we miss when we take a photo. Thus, a sort of balance must be kept between the pictures that are important for you to take and those that are excess. How often do you mindlessly snap away at something, without really knowing why? Do you often go back over a mass of photos only to discover that many of them just don't make sense, or hold little meaning? Most importantly, what did you miss when taking your pictures?

***

I've posed a lot of questions without answers, simply because I'm still answering them myself. I still struggle between the urge to document everything like my mother and the wish to experience Paris moment by moment. I've found it much easier to take pictures than to put away the camera, but more rewarding to do the latter.

We're only in Paris for a short time. Thus, we must choose wisely how we wish to spend our attention. Taking photos is important, and so is putting down the camera. It is up to us as intellectual individuals to determine when it is appropriate to do both.