Silhouettes

I find myself thinking a lot these days about how i will use a camera on the road, when away from Key West. I have been taking these pictures for 13 years with much better technical capabilities in telephones and dedicated cameras. I look back over my early forays into digital photography and I cringe a bit. 

Even now I struggle to define what it is I do as I wander around recording mangroves and mudflats, historic homes and little street eccentricities. In an era of personal pocket cameras it's hard to imagine my trove of tens of thousands of street pictures of wildly varying quality will be of any interest to anyone, certainly not in the form of pioneering photography. I see photos taken a hundred years ago, smudged blurry and banal in composition yet they will live forever because they were first, they broke new ground and all that follows is a pale imitation of the pioneering shutter click.

In the twenty years I have lived and worked in Key West the city has undergone radical transformation as the Internet and improved utilities and remote delivery have made this outpost of non-conformity accessible to the mainstream. I am unapologetic in saying that before the Internet and before the rebuilt highway Key West was too isolated for me, but I have equally done my best not to tread on those parts of this town that I cherish in others, the ability to behave oddly in public and not be berated for it. 

I remember vividly an encounter a good few years ago when someone on Pohalski Lane asked me what I was doing and i replied taking photos because I think it's pretty. Do you live here she asked as though interrogating a low life... No I said but I work in town and I like to walk around and enjoy it on my breaks. She looked accusingly at me and said I've never seen you around. Well I said I go to work then I go home to my wife and I don't  go to parties at bars. She gave up on me. Which exchange about sums it up. I would rather poke my eye out than parade down Duval Street in my underwear, or attend a party dressed as a pirate or even spend a day chasing fish on the water under a burning sun or post pictures of myself doing any of that.  I flit  like  a shadow, a not very agile shadow but out of the limelight nonetheless.

If it is abundantly clear from the nearly 5,000 entries on this page key West for me is somewhere else, a place not populated by bikinis and bars, or sunsets and margaritas but it is mine own, a place of odd signs and elaborate gingerbread decorations, a place where being yourself allowed for a measure of freedom from the herd. My colleagues tell me I am weird because I like to walk and take pictures. I think they are weird because they live and work here and seem to have no curiosity about this town filled with history and physical beauty. 

I wonder how, when traveling with wife and dog I shall find the space to seek out these quiet spaces along the way, to be alone with my thoughts and my camera. My Rusty is an excellent partner in that he waits when he is leashed and he amuses himself when he is off leash as I frame and focus and press the shutter. My wife is very patient and encouraging, pushing me out of the door and making suggestions as to what to photograph, suggestions that used to irritate me until I came to appreciate her eye and her wisdom. I have tried to encourage her to take pictures but it is a seed that sprouts imperceptibly slowly.

I had a thought the other day while reading the blog of a man I dare call a  friend now that I have met him: Scooter In The Sticks . Steve's meditations on riding and photographing and finding serenity on a Vespa in Central Pennsylvania never completely translated to my own use of two wheels. I had a very different riding style which makes it all the more ironic I got knocked down while riding as gently as Steve habitually does. I never found riding to be a meditation, it was exhilarating and engaging and offered lovely solitude but not meditation. I suddenly realized that my camera offers me similar sensations to those so deftly observed by Steve on his page. Where he rides a Vespa to look inward I make pictures to do the same. 

I don't view myself as an artist, my Asperger-ish brain  doesn't much allow flights of fantasy and I struggle to see the abstract in the world around me, or heaven forbid, manipulate the world to create an image pleasing to my artistic mind.I guess I have to settle on being a documentary photographer inasmuch as I like to document the world around me. Were I inclined to seek drama I would rate this as being a journalist but I am tired of the nonsense of pursuing the news as I once did.  

I like to walk around the keys with a  camera and make pictures. That's all. I shall do the same and try to make them interesting to accompany my stories on the road. How I'm going to do that I'm not at all sure but I expect we shall muddle through.