UNphotographable
Author of this post: Kevin Kelly | About Blog Authors »While I was in school, and for a few years after graduation, I carried a digital camera with me pretty much everywhere I went. If I saw something interesting, odd or inspiring, I’d snap a photo, and because of this habit, I eventually came to possess a pretty extensive catalog of visual references.
I don’t carry a camera with me anymore, for a couple of reasons. For starters, I already lug around a laptop, a phone, keys, my wallet, sunglasses and sometimes an iPod. It’s a ridiculous amount of gear, and frankly, the camera just isn’t making the cut these days. But the real reason why I stopped taking pictures is because, more often than not, the images just weren’t all that compelling after the fact. Taking a photo was too easy, and as a result, I grew lazy.
And so I appreciate UNphotographable, a website created by Michael David Murphy. The pages of UNphotographable contain written descriptions of images that, for one reason or another, could not be captured on film. The great majority of the accounts are provided by Murphy, but I believe a few were produced by others. Here’s an example:
This is a picture I did not take of a woman standing on an overgrown median of the Van Wyck Expressway early on a Saturday morning, early enough that there was one sliver of sunlight making its way across the road, and she was caught in both the light and tall grass, bent at the waist, picking herbs or salad greens from between discarded fast food containers and old tires, incorporating a wild, pinwheeling movement with each pick, her arms swinging up like scythes, alternatively holding a fistful of greens high in the air, as if each leaf were a triumph, as her opposite arm swung down to pick anew.
In a world where images, especially bad images, seem destined to proliferate, I find this sort of clarity and the high level of articulation refreshing. Murphy’s accounts of the scenes he failed to capture on film are usually incredibly detailed, and as a result, one develops a true and tangible sense of exactly what is about the scene that makes it worthy of our attention. The images I conjure in my mind are, I suspect, more vivid than even the ones I could hold in my hands.
