Section 2: Gerrish Island

Atmosphere & light / Artistic value / Other atmospheres

Several days after my session in the Bog, I went with some of my family to our beach, which we refer to by the name of the island where it is located: Gerrish Island, or Gerr for short. I hoped to take some pictures that would capture the atmosphere of this beach, which - having spent much of my childhood there, and having taken pictures at Gerr many times - I know to be exceptional for its clear, crystalline light.

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Outside of any but the narrowest scientific contexts, atmosphere is a slippery concept, resistant to firm distinctions. In photography, atmosphere might refer to the mood of a picture, or certain kinds of ethereal, soft moods which are called atmospheric, or simply to the atmosphere itself, which has dramatic effects on the light and colors of the photograph. The atmosphere shapes the light, which shapes… the picture’s atmosphere. In fact, light and atmosphere are so closely linked as to be interchangeable, at least outside during the day. Skilled editors or those with carefully controlled studio environments can counterfeit certain lighting conditions, creating atmospheres at will. But for photographers like me who shoot primarily outside during the day, atmosphere is a factor of the quality of the light, which itself depends on many other factors: the height of the sun, and the atmospheric conditions, including the air’s humidity, temperature, and degree/type of cloud cover. Other factors can come into play, such as the cover given by trees, the effects of precipitation, the reflectivity of the ground - sand and snow, for example, change a picture’s atmosphere - or other sources of light besides the sun, which are relevant at night. 

Some photographers, especially landscape photographers, consider atmosphere or light to be a truer subject of their pictures than the objects that fill their frames. For example, in his book Mountain Light - an influential book among landscape photographers and in my own development as an artist - the photographer and mountaineer Galen Rowell wrote landscapes are not “simple objects to be photographed” (Rowell 4). In his view, photographers “are never photographing an object, but rather light itself” (4). This assertion has a scientific basis: in a chapter on capturing color faithfully, Rowell writes that “all objects are colorless - black, that is - until they reflect or transmit light” (76). After having “this simple realization,” Rowell reorients his entire artistic approach around light: “instead of looking at the natural world for objects to photograph in color, I began to look for the light” (76).  Much of his book focuses on scientific explanations of various phenomena of mountain light - including the atmospheric conditions that create them - as well as technical discussions of how to photograph these phenomena. His assertion, about looking for the light, for example, comes in the middle of a detailed discussion of how cameras and color film react to light differently than human perception. Success as a photographer, Rowell argues, depends on understanding the atmosphere and its effect on light. 

However, light is not just a technical concern or scientific phenomenon in Rowell’s analysis, but also a metaphor for the artistic value of photography, which comes from both the spiritual truth found in nature and the photographer’s personal artistic vision. Pictures succeed or fail on the basis of their light; he suggests that “where there is no light, [photographers] will have no picture; where there is remarkable light, they may have a remarkable picture” (4). Rowell often describes mountain light in spiritual terms, such as “magic hour,” or “magic light,” and begins his book with Cedric Wright’s [6] assertion that “the mountain photographer is interpreting the face of nature - that mysterious infinity, eternally a refuge, a reservoir, an amplifier of spirit; a mother of dreams” (xiii). At the same time, the concept of light also represents the artist’s personal vision, which must be carefully balanced with the spirit of the subject.  His “dynamic landscapes” - the subtitle of his book is “in search of the dynamic landscape”- is defined by its balance between “personal vision” and “splendid natural events” (2). “The literal definition of the word photography,” he asserts in a later chapter, “ is ‘to write with light,’ and in the mountains I take that as a dictum” (122). As a final example, one of the few quotes from other photographers Rowell includes is from Cartier-Bresson, who argued that photography must contain a “balance must be established” between the “two worlds” of “discovery of oneself” and “discovery of the world around us” (27).

The best example of the tension between these two sources of artistic power is when Rowell compares the light in his work to the “painterly light” of certain Romantic painters like Turner, Church and Bierstadt [7]. This comparison, which strangely includes Rousseau and Dalí alongside the Romantics, suggests a subjective source of artistic value from within the artist (110). In fact, Proust’s narrator makes a similar assertion about the painter Elstir when he suggests that his paintings lack the visual hierarchy and discernment that elevates certain aspects of reality above others. The example the narrator gives is a painting of a “waterside carnival,” in which the “slightly vulgar” woman’s dress “shimmered” “in the same way” as the sail of a boat, the water of the harbor, the landing, the trees and the sky (III.576). In Elistir’s painting, “she is beautiful too; her dress is receiving the same light as the sail of that boat, everything is equally precious; the commonplace dress and the sail that is beautiful in itself are two mirrors reflecting the same image; their virtue is all in the painter’s eye” (III.576). For the narrator, what makes Elstir’s paintings great is their light, and in his analysis, that light comes from the artist: his paintings are like “the luminous images of a magic lantern, which in this instance was the brain of the artist” (III.574). Rowell, however, argues that this light is a sign of these painters’ Emersonian “direct appreciation of wild places,” which “presupposed color photography'' in its aim to “replicate the light of natural moments” (Rowell 110). It’s a bold interpretation: in his view, the power of Romantic painters - and even Rousseua and Dalí!- comes from their accurate depictions of nature. But implicit in this interpretation is the awareness that direct appreciation of nature is subjective and artistic; surely Rowell knows that the Hudson River School painters didn’t accurately depict upstate New York.  Similarly, the narrator’s interpretation of Elstir implies that part of his “magic light” is fidelity to objective reality: Elstir keeps the dancing woman in the painting of the carnival when a “man of discernment” would have removed her from “the poetical composition which nature has set before him” (III.576). Light makes powerful artists, but whether in the work of Romantic painters, Dalí, Rowell or Elistir, this light comes both from nature and from the artist.

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I went to Gerrish Island because of the beach’s atmosphere, and in that atmosphere, I sensed a solution to my photographic dilemma. My problem is that I want to use photography to discover the moving, beautiful coherence of the world around me, but the only way I can do so is to utilize my own artistic vision, which feels like sullying that beauty, or inventing it entirely, and then lying about its source. Perhaps, I thought, by locating the source of artistic value in the atmosphere which the subjects and myself are immersed in, I can, like Rowell, find a balance between my artistic vision and the beauty of the external world. On Gerrish Island, both the rocks I photograph and I bathe equally in the sea light and the salty atmosphere; perhaps I don’t need to put me and my subject on opposite sides of a clear distinction.  

The day I went to Gerr was an exceptionally hot one for June in Maine. This disappointed me; though it made swimming possible - a rare occurrence given the 57° water temperature - what makes Gerrish Island a good place to take pictures is that it’s often cool and clear. The sea atmosphere, sweeping in from the mouth of the Piscataqau River with the incoming tide, renders the light with a delicate, sparkling quality with a hint of blue; far-away things feel much closer than they are, and the pictures feel sharp in the same way that pictures taken at high altitude do. On the day I was there with my family, however, the air that rolled in off the ocean felt just as hot and sticky as the air inland. One look at the shimmering horizon was enough to tell me I wasn’t going to get the clear, crisp photos I wanted, especially at longer focal lengths. My disappointment intensified when I took some pictures of my sister sailing. The heat distortion made my photos hazy and unfocused; it looked as if my photos were impressionist paintings:

I had wanted to take pictures of a rock field on the southern end of our beach, which culminates in a massive boulder called Storytelling Rock. As a child, I spent many hours on these rocks, searching the tide pools around them for crabs, playing fantastical games with my cousins on Storytelling Rock, or bounding from rock to rock down the length of the rock field as quickly as I could. I don’t remember falling or hurting myself once. In my memory - which is bathed in the clear light I associate with Gerr - my feet can’t miss their marks. Looking through the wavering, hazy air on that afternoon, the rocks felt hard, hot, and dangerous; I couldn’t imagine crossing them without shoes at all, let alone at speed. Storytelling Rock felt small, and it had more lichen and birdshit than I remembered; it was difficult to find a spot where I could clearly see the granite grain. While on top, out of habit, I looked for a quarter that for as long as I’d been going to the beach had been jammed in a crack. I couldn’t remember which crack it was, and I couldn’t find the quarter.

I also couldn’t imagine capturing what I’d hoped to photograph in those rocks. The light was all wrong, and they’d come out hazy and muddy at longer range, and yellow-tinted up close. Storytelling Rock felt small and unimpressive, and there was more lichen and birdshit than I remembered.  I could correct - perhaps invent, or recreate would be better words - the colors in post-processing, but I suspected my editing skills could only take me so far. Like the difficulty of describing the feeling of a dream to a bored breakfast-mate, the colors of the mind are difficult to reproduce in Adobe Lightroom.

There were other atmospheres that affected my photography that afternoon, like my family atmosphere. My parents, my sister, my parents’ dogs, my aunt, my great-aunt and my grandmother all made appearances on the beach that afternoon. My wife, unfortunately, had to work, and so she remained in the wifi at home. Not that my wife would have joined me while I took pictures anyway - she has been known to leave me behind on walks if I bring my camera - an entirely understandable reaction given the tediousness of watching someone take 25 different shots of the same flower. In any case, I spent a lot of the afternoon not taking artistic pictures of rocks, but rigging a Laser, sailing, playing with my parents’ dogs, and talking to my relatives. Even when I did take pictures, most of them were social; I took pictures of my sister, my parents, the dogs - my parents wanted a good shot of their 10-month-old puppy Bingley - and my aunt, who asked that I take a series of photos documenting her swimming in the freezing water. None of these, I felt at the time, would be relevant to my project. When I did go on a photo walk, my sister accompanied me, making sarcastic suggestions, getting bored as I fiddled with the tripod for a series of macro shots on top of Storytelling Rock, and eventually abandoning me to rejoin the family. I didn’t mind her presence, but at the same time, taking photos alone feels quite different than taking them with another person, and I feel certain the results would be different as well. I often felt like the narrator, who would be able to get to work on his novel, if only he could tear himself away from all of the fancy parties at the aristocratic Guermantes’. Part of the atmosphere on Gerr that day was the social atmosphere, and that atmosphere affected my pictures, even the ones I took alone without anyone in them. Like my sister, I didn’t want to separate myself from the family for too long, and given the poor light, I didn’t take as much time as I’d planned on my pictures. It felt more important to be with my family.

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The idea of locating the success of a picture in its atmosphere or light is freeing, but once we expand our frame to include more than the subject - or more than the subject, the photographer and the camera - it becomes hard to find a reason to stop stretching that frame. Atmosphere is a slippery concept, or a gaseous one; it tends to fill any volume we give it.  

For example, I call Gerr our beach, and that this beach belongs to my family helps make it a special place for me; the many family bonfires, games of beach bocce and low-tide expeditions to Aunt Gurden’s Island - the government calls it Fishing Island - are as integral to my idea of the beach as its clear blue light. But, like anything involving property and family, the reality of Gerr is considerably more complicated than I understood as a child. The beach is ours in the sense that it belongs to my grandmother, my great-aunt, and my great-uncle in equal parts. When they die, their share will be divided between their descendents; when eventually it comes to me and my sister, we will be two of as many as ten owners, depending on who dies when. Also, my mental geography of Gerr doesn’t correspond to the actual property lines. Gerr runs the length of the entire cove, from one rocky outcropping - the unnamed one with a massive dock washed up on it - along the gently curving beach studded with rocks, to Storytelling Rock. But we only own a small portion of this quarter-mile strip. For one, the northern half of the beach has belonged to a semi-estranged branch of the family since the death of my great-great Aunt Lispen in the 1980s. For another, my great aunt who inherited the other half - this was part of the reason for the semi-estrangement - sold her portion of the land during the crash. Since then, our family has only retained a small parking lot fringed with poison ivy, the right of way to get there, and the beach in front of it. This makes me hesitant to linger for long on Storytelling Rock; it is technically trespassing for me to be there. On the other hand, having access to a private beach is a rare privilege that I might designate the socio-economic atmosphere of my pictures. Certainly, that atmosphere is as important as the light; access to beautiful spaces like Gerr or southern Maine, the money to buy expensive cameras, the time to travel to Maine and take pictures: all of these are determinative factors. 

One can imagine almost infinite atmospheres that affect my photography. The legal atmosphere matters, and in fact it’s visible in the pictures if you know where to look. Ownership of tidal beaches like Gerr is much looser than ownership of dry land; it would be illegal to fence the beach, and while Maine law stipulates that anyone passing through the intertidal zone must be fishing or fowling, in practice it would be miserly to bar the many walkers and kayakers from the nearby public beach. There were many fewer of the beach walkers in my childhood; now however, there’s almost always a stranger on the beach. This has a direct effect on my photography; I frame my shots to avoid the beach walkers to keep tourists out of my images of Gerr, but in so doing, create a different sort of vulgarity. We can expand the frame further; if the provenance of the beach and the property laws of Maine are part of my photography, why not the technological atmosphere? Should I credit the engineers who designed my camera and lenses? Why not consider the software engineers who programmed Lightroom, or at least those who engineered either the automatic exposure systems in my camera and Lightroom. Most of my pictures rely on one or both of those systems; I rarely shoot in full manual, and while I often tweak my pictures in post, the automatic adjustments are a good starting place.  Aren’t the white balance of my computer monitor or the lightbulbs in my study also components of any artistic value in my photographs? Or, as is more likely, do they deserve a share of the blame for any artistic failures? And for that matter, isn’t the medium in which I publish the pictures - in this case a somewhat garish website - also relevant to the pictures’ merit as art? 

Galen Rowell isn’t interested in these questions, but they are relevant to In Search of Lost Time. Rowell dispenses rapidly with the idea that editing or developing film has any artistic significance, quoting an 1890 report by the not-very-well-known photographic scientists Hunter and Driffield, which establishes an arbitrary distinction between the “art” of creating “a perfect picture by photography” and the “science” of producing “a technically perfect negative” (Rowell 36). In Proust, however, the atmospheres that produce, affect and surround art are crucial. For example, one of the narrator’s principal failures as an appreciator of art is that he imagines them in an idealistic vacuum entirely separate from the material world. When he encounters the porch at Balbec [8] - an intricately carved church entrance he’s idealized for years - “fettered to the square” where its church sits, sullied by its proximity to a café, “an omnibus office,” and a bank, and even “reduced by its own stone semblance” into a physical object, rather than a universal ideal (II.323-4). The narrator even uses an atmospheric metaphor to describe this process; the name of the church “ought to have been kept hermetically sealed,” but reality is like “a pneumatic force,” an “external pressure” “irresistibly” forcing itself into the vacuum of the narrator’s imagination (II.325). This moment is an argument to consider art within their atmospheres, as are the structure of the books themselves, whose inclusion of detailed portrayals of the social atmosphere surrounding the narrator speaks in itself to the importance of societal context to art. On the other hand, one can go too far. Upon hearing the fictional composer Vintueil’s sonata and its little phrase, Swann (a sophisticated and scholarly friend of the narrator’s family) immediately wonders about the person who created that ineffably powerful art. Swann asks Mme Verdurin - his host at the party where the sonata is played - “what else he had done, at what period in his life he had composed the sonata, and what meaning the little phrase could have had for him - that was what Swann wanted most to know” (I.300). The reality, however, is not as resonant as what Swann imagines; in fact, Swann knows Vintueil, but assumes the “genius” who composed the sonata cannot be the “silly old fool” he knows (I.302). The reader and the narrator know that if Swann were to uncover the truth of the sonata’s familial or emotional atmosphere, he would discover a depressing and sordid story of the sadism and depravity in the composer’s household [9]. It is better for Swann’s appreciation of the little phrase not to take these questions too far. That said, the work of the novel is to widen the frame to include the full atmosphere of the sonata, which proves to be resonant in a broader sense than Swann imagines, especially when Mlle. Vintuiel’s friend (who urges his daughter to spit on Vintueil’s portrait) is the one to assemble the fragments of Vintueil’s work into the masterpiece it becomes later. There must be some limit, but I’m not sure the novel - and certainly not me - knows where it is. The frame must include more than just the subject and the artist, but how wide to open the lens is difficult to resolve.

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There’s a striking picture of Galen Rowell on the back cover of Mountain Light [10]. He’s posing in a mountain meadow with his dog Khumbu, wearing short shirts, hiking boots, and a Patagonia shirt, his camera hanging around his neck and his backpack on his back. I didn’t see this picture until 2015, which was years after I began to think about photography more seriously. But it corresponds closely with an idea of myself as an artist and a person: adventurous, confident, in nature, and, crucially, alone. Part of my idealization of wilderness photography was the figure of the solitary artist-adventurer, who heads into the wild to encounter it without intermediaries or distractions, including other people. The artist should be independent, and the art should come from nature as much as possible. If any of a picture’s resonance comes from some other source, let it be from me. Part of this is my personality; though I’ve become more social as I’ve gotten older, I was a somewhat solitary child, and I remain someone who’s happy to spend time alone, which, by the way, is something I shared with my grandfather. Some of it is my understanding of photography, though. Photography tends to separate the photographer from other people; besides removing myself from groups to go take pictures, putting myself behind a big lens moves me to the fringes of any social gathering - all the better to capture group shots. It makes me an observer rather than a participant, or it can if I don’t remember to put the camera down. 

My wife once told me that my pictures were boring because there’s never any people in them. I don’t accept that calumny, of course, and I will continue to take pictures of lichen and tree bark, thank you very much… but she’s not wrong either. There are very few people in my pictures, and as I’m reviewing the pictures to upload to the gallery, I’m realizing that this isn’t as important as I’d thought. A photograph’s content is part of its resonance, not just its form. However striking my picture of a rock is, it’s still just a rock, and even if my pictures of my parents or my sister aren’t perfectly framed or exposed, they still carry with them the significance of those people to me. The distinction between Photography-with-a-capital-P and taking a few social pictures is more of a spectrum than a firm distinction; my first gallery from Gerrish Island isn’t any more - or much more - artistic than my second. The power of a picture to evoke, to interest, to catch the eye and to move the viewer - none of these depend on a narrow definition of artistic merit. My photos can be more expansive than they have been, and while it is certainly possible to expand the frame too far - not every shot needs to be a wide-angle, and a photograph that admits every relevant atmosphere would be too muddy to distinguish the subject - it won’t hurt to let a little more into the picture.

Section 3: Walking to the Harbor

Time / Memory / Authenticity

Towards the end of my week in Maine, I turned my attention to a particular route that I’d taken many times in my youth: the walk from my parents’ house to the harbor. I hadn’t yet edited any of the pictures from Gerrish Island or the Bog, and so I was anxious about what I still felt were not very successful sessions. I hadn’t had any involuntary memories à la Proust - which were much more important to this project as I originally convinced it - and I thought that I should attack the problem directly. Very little had changed on the route since I’d walked it as a child and an adolescent, and I hoped to be able to take pictures that would recapture something of that period of my life. 

The first section of the walk is defined by two stone walls. The first is a retaining wall covered holding up a small lawn in front of a large oceanfront home; the second is a much more imposing barrier separating the Big House - a house that once belonged to my great-grandfather - from York St. The texture of these walls feels as familiar as that of my own skin; even now, carrying my backpack of lenses, I run my fingers along them. They’re both stone, but they feel completely different, a sign, perhaps of the entirely different places they occupy in my mind.

The retaining wall’s defining feature is its yellow lichen, which covers nearly its entire length. The lichen once felt endlessly tall and long; even now, its top only chest-high and its length only a few strides, the lichen wall nonetheless retains my childhood impression of its endlessness and omnipresence, but shifted from the vertical and horizontal dimensions to the temporal. It feels exactly the same as it did when I was a child; the lichen gives the wall variation and texture; some spots feel soft and springy like a moss garden, others hard and rough, like old leather cracking under the sun. Even the spots of the wall that seem to be free of lichen retain its texture; under the magnification of my lens, it’s apparent that no spot on this wall lacks lichen if you look closely enough. It’s warm to the touch, as the wall always was on warm afternoons and even late into the evening. The color also feels important to me; its particular shade of yellow vibrates within my mind at a level deeper than association with any specific memory. The lichen - which grows everywhere in York in the same shade of deep yellow - feels like the substrate of my memories of Maine. The light was good, and fiddling with my macro lens and tripod, I brought the image into focus at a magnification that made the lichen in the picture exactly as large as the lichen on the wall. It was easy to capture its texture and color. For once, I felt good about the pictures as I took them.

The Big House wall, on the other hand, felt cool and smooth. There’s lichen here too, but much less. I didn’t try to photograph any of it - the wall is much taller and straighter, putting it into shadow, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to get enough depth of field - and I wondered if whoever maintains the wall scrubs it off periodically. It wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t know who owns the house now, and in fact I think there have been several owners since my great-grandfather died and the house was sold. But my idea of the owner is very specific: I imagine the owner as a younger Scrooge, or maybe even more like an older, human Scrooge McDuck, since Scrooge McDuck’s miserliness didn’t apply to himself as well [12]. The reason for this image is the stone door in the wall, which has a small grated window into which it was once possible to look at the lawn and the house. I looked through the window every day I passed, as though checking up on a possession I’d lent to someone else. Later, the owners installed a pool - something I thought deeply vulgar, and then, shockingly, a pool house, which blocked any grate-gazers from seeing the house itself. In recent years, the owners have installed a mirror behind the grating, giving voyeurs like me a horrifying glimpse of ourselves in the act of voyeurism. Part of me still finds this distasteful and totally unwarranted; but a more mature part of me recognizes that it’s reasonable to prevent descendants of former owners from jamming their faces into a grating in the wall around a house they own, and have owned for many years. I didn’t take nearly as many pictures of this wall; beyond a few showing myself in the act of voyeurism, there’s not much else to photograph, and I continued down towards the harbor.

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As I scroll through the photos from this week and review what I’ve written so far, I realize that I’ve believed in two promises of photography. I’ve already discussed the promise and difficulties of objectivity embedded within a camera, but there is a second promise that is equally important, if more subtle: the promise of timelessness. As I consider what I sought in the Bog, on Gerrish Island and on the walk to the harbor, I realize that I sought a refuge from the passage of time as much as I sought the truth embedded in the reality of my subjects. 

A simple definition of cameras might be devices that capture how something looks at a particular moment in time. Within this definition, skilled photographers tend to focus on the first half: devices that capture how something looks. An image is successful if it is visually interesting or compelling in some way, and the moment at which the photograph is taken is less important than the form of the picture, its lighting, its exposure, its focus, or any other of the many aspects that define a photograph’s composition. Even some photographs that seem to focus on the temporal dimension of taking pictures - I’m thinking here of photographs of dramatic, singular events like the man blocking the tank in Tiananmen Square, or Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Peter Norman at the 1968 Olympics [13] - still succeed on the basis of their imagery rather than when they were taken. The images are striking whether or not you know their context (this is also why it’s so easy to find them used out of context), and certain photographs with particularly good composition dominate among the many other shots of both moments precisely because of their good composition. The same might be said of other apparently-temporal pictures, like of bald eagles or bears snatching fish out of the water, or of whales breaching the sea. While these pictures emphasize the moment in which they occur through the immobilization of normally-dynamic water or fish, the ones that get reproduced and published tend to have excellent focus, and interesting composition as well. Social media amplifies this effect; visually interesting images drive much more engagement than dull ones, regardless of what they depict. 

That said, relatively few photographers take pictures intending to capture interesting or powerful visual phenomena. Interesting visual phenomena that are also easy to photograph are rare; most of us learn to stop trying to take pictures of rainbows, constellations or the moon because unless we have the specialized skill and equipment necessary to take a good picture, the pictures pale in comparison to reality. Most photographers - and in an age when nearly everyone carries a powerful camera in their pockets, this means most people - take most of their pictures because of the second part of their definition: cameras are devices that capture how something looks at a particular moment in time. For many people, taking pictures is primarily about recording moments, which is to say, capturing memories. My sister is an example of this second type; she hates it when I delete pictures of family events regardless of how bad they are. Because pictures are primarily valuable to her as memories, she would have dozens of blurry photos of the same few people at a family party rather than one good one. The bad ones where people are looking away, or have their eyes closed, or their mouths open might even be better than the good picture; they more accurately capture the people and the moment of getting the picture taken. I remember once when we were very young, we went on a family trip to San Francisco, for which my mother gave us each a disposable film camera with 35 shots. My sister used almost all of her shots during lunch on the first day taking blurry shots of pigeons wandering around the cafe where we ate. She was 4, and in that moment, which felt important to her at the time, it was necessary to document everything to be certain that she would be able to remember it later.

The success of Instagram and its many ways of drawing engagement to otherwise ordinary photos also speak to this fact; skillfully wielded, Instagram can make your dull photos feel as interesting to others as the event you recorded felt to you at the time. If the image didn’t capture the excitement you felt, add a filter, tag a few folks who were there, toss on an animated sticker or two, add an amusing caption, and you’ve created something more interesting and engaging than the photo alone. Outside of Instagram, consider the proliferation of professional photographers at important life events. I know someone who has purchased at least 5 photo shoots in the life of their 6-month-old child, in addition to several during the pregnancy. This is an extreme example, but I think it’s a representative one as well; for most children born today, it will be impossible to avoid nearly-complete documentation of their growth into adults, although my suspicion is that these photo shoots can never document the most important and meaningful moments along that journey. We might also consider the proliferation of services like the camera roll on an iPhone or Google Photos; these apps claim to be services for storing and organizing pictures, but they’re much better understood as services for organizing and displaying memories. Many of the pictures are there not because they’re good pictures, but because they memorialize some particular moment that I wouldn’t like to forget. I don’t publish these pictures - I know enough to know that no one else will find them interesting - but I do take them, and I do keep them. Scrolling through Google Photos feels like flicking through a scrapbook of my entire life, or like the ‘my-life-flashed-before-my-eyes’ scene in movies; no doubt a large team of talented software engineers dedicated a lot of effort giving their app a similarly significant feeling.

Consciously or not, when we take a picture to record a moment, we’re seeking a refuge from time. Photography, especially digital photography enabled by our phones, is our technological attempt to create what the narrator called the “medium” “outside time” (VII.262). Someone like Walter Benjamin might be able to connect this aspect of photography to a larger revolutionary process, even the destruction of the world as it once was. Perhaps some of the ‘Screenagers’ crowd - by which I mean those who campaign against the influence of phones, apps, social media, the internet or technology broadly - are inheritors of Benjamin-style historical reasoning, although Benjamin had the courage to look ahead to a new world despite his ambivalence about the disappearance of the old one. Modern-day luddites - or at least the professional version of modern-day luddites who combine fear mongering about technology with slick presentations suitable for the private school lecture circuit - might argue that our memories are outsourced to apps, like our knowledge is outsourced to Google. In our substitution of photographs for memories, might we lose the ability to remember at all? Will we live only in the present and the aspirational future, manipulated at the whim of whoever controls the algorithms to which we’ve given our minds? Many people worry about these questions, but I don’t find this kind of thing at all convincing. Lacking a sufficiently rigid ideological framework, I find worrying about phones or Facebook ending the world totally absurd, and I imagine the effects of digital technology will be mostly mixed, complicated, and not clear for a very long time, if ever. Still, I’m left wondering about what happens when we take a picture to memorialize a moment, both in that moment, and after we take the picture. Can we succeed in preserving that moment? How does photography connect with memory? And what if the moment we seek has already passed? As I write them, I realize that these questions undergird my entire project; all of the questions this piece have asked so far can be considered versions of one, larger question: can we use photography to recapture lost time?

For Proust, the answer to this question is no. There are moments in the novel when characters use photography to attempt to remember or preserve something through time, but these attempts do not succeed. The narrator’s grandmother, for example, uses photography to preserve a memory of her for her grandson when she believes that her death is near. At the time, the narrator believes her desire to be photographed as “childishness,” but he later learns from his servant Françoise that his grandmother’s reason for being photographed is to give the narrator something of her “to keep” if she dies before leaving Balbec (II.500, IV.238). However, this attempt is unsuccessful. Though the narrator does retain something of his grandmother after her death, it is not because of her photograph. Even after resurrecting his grandmother in his memory upon his return to Balbec, the narrator still sees not his “real grandmother” in the photograph, but the old, ill “stranger” of the final months of her life (IV.211, 237). Indeed, reflecting the narrator’s view of photography as entirely objective and unartistic, he uses photography as a metaphor for unsuccessful attempts to recapture lost time. Just before stumbling on the uneven paving stones (a pivotal moment in which the narrator finally understands how to recapture lost time), the narrator tries to awaken himself and his literary spirit from a mood of “lassitude and boredom” by drawing “from my memory other ‘snapshots’” from Venice” (VII.253). This intentional sort of memorializing fails miserably: “the mere word ‘snapshot’ made Venice seem to me as boring as an exhibition of photographs” (VII.254). Lost Time can not be found in photography; in Time Regained, that is a job for memory and art.  

♦♦♦

I didn’t read Time Regained until well after returning from Maine, but I felt the same feeling the narrator does on recalling Venice as I looked at my pictures of lichen: there is nothing of the past in them. This was not because the pictures are bad. Compared to the atmosphere of Gerrish Island or the presence of my grandfather in the Bog, the lichen was a straightforward and ubiquitous subject. As I walked down to the harbor, I found many spots of yellow - either other patches of lichen, or other yellow things - that I might’ve used as the symbolic presence of memory. The film pictures, grainy and yellow-shifted, are particularly evocative. It would have been easy to embellish that presence in my editing and in my writing as well; I could even have made digital versions of the double exposures I took overlaying the lichen onto York Street. If I wanted an image of the harbor with lichen covering part or all of the image, or if I wanted a selfie with lichen appearing to grow on me, or on my camera, that would have been easy. And yet, neither when I took the pictures nor when I look at them now do I feel any sense that I’ve been transported through time. I didn’t feel any particular memories bubbling up from my subconscious. Mostly, I found myself thinking about how I might use pictures of this lichen to falsify a connection to my memory. Though the two walls felt quite different to my hand; their pictures feel the same: cold, unresponsive, and opaque.  

In another universe, there’s a version of this piece that intersperses the pictures with descriptions of me as a child, carrying a too-large beach chair and a bag of beach toys on a hot day. The chair keeps bumping in the lichen wall, and the bag on the ground. I pause to shift my grip, but it’s too much for me, and I drop it all to the ground. But before I pick it up again and follow my mother, I pause for a moment to feel the lichen. My mother is walking rapidly away - I’m afraid I’ll lose her - but there’s something in the roughness of the lichen that compels my fingers to linger, its hint of give it adds to the rock, the way it makes the rock feel like something alive….

But this memory is an invention, and any aura it gives to my pictures of lichen are false. As I huddle over my computer in a South Carolina beach condo avoiding my wife’s family, I’m tempted to write lyrically of the many memories that might have appeared - but didn’t - before my mind’s eye as I walked down to the harbor. I could use real memories which occurred to me later, find some now, or invent plausible ones; if I did so convincingly enough, I might even end up believing them myself. Even now, looking at the pictures, I can feel the imaginary texture of the lichen in my invented memory - which I suppose is the real texture of what the lichen felt like as I photographed it several weeks ago. While it would be clear to a thoughtful reader that I wasn’t obeying Proust’s assertion that recapturing lost time must be involuntary and involve apparently trivial details, most readers would be happy to give me the benefit of the doubt. No one likes to think too hard about how the sausage is made. But doing so feels inexpressibly vulgar and dishonest; what makes good pictures is faithfulness, and the truth is that these memories aren’t really embedded in the pictures. Writing about them felt like writing about what’s behind the Big House wall; I can tell any number of family stories set there, like the one about my grandfather and great uncle driving the car into the greenhouse in the middle of the night, but they’re not my memories. Even if I could tell them plausibly, they’d lack the authentic patina of an earlier time, at least to me. 

I even went to the trouble to research Xanthoria parietina [13], which is (I think) the species of lichen that grows on the wall in front of the Cottage. One way around the dishonesty of crafting a narrative around the pictures I took might be technical writing; sometimes, very dry and detailed descriptions of things can suggest deeper resonances without asserting them directly. I learned, for example, that X. parietina (like all lichen) is a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae. The fungi provides the structure and body of the lichen, whereas the algae provides the photosynthesis. It’s a particularly widespread and hardy species whose yellow color is an adaptation against UV radiation, and it grows best in coastal areas of the northeastern United States, perhaps reflecting the marine origins of lichen itself. I also learned that it’s particularly tolerant of pollution, and finds birdshit an excellent fertilizer. All of these aspects of the lichen makes the retaining wall a prime location, and it’s easy to imagine all of them carrying symbolic weight. I considered telling the story of this path and my photography from the lichen’s perspective. The idea was that lichen grows so slowly as to not really grow at all, and if it were conscious, it might not lose time in the way we do; perhaps its perspective is timeless. But, as my research indicates, lichen doesn’t grow as slowly as I thought it did; in fact, I learned that the lichen I see today is probably something like 5-10x the lichen I first started noticing 25 years ago, with much more structure and larger bodies. This is especially true given the warming climate of Maine. Apparently, lichen’s been growing faster than ever before.

Now, scrolling through my online photo storage, I can flick through the months and years as quickly as they might pass for my imaginary ageless lichen on the wall. I can recall exactly where and when each picture was taken, but these pictures don’t transport me back to that moment like the madeline or the cobblestone. Walter Benjamin might argue that this is because of their reproducibility, but I think this is only part of it. I see these pictures too often; stored in Google photos, where they’re infinitely reproducible, always easy to find and impossible to lose, the pictures lose their ability to convey the passage of time or convey me back to an earlier time because I can’t forget them. The only photos that can bring me back to the past are photos I’ve forgotten that I took, or never seen - photos I find in a rarely-opened drawer, or used as a bookmark in a book I haven’t read for many years, not ones I in which I took steps to ensure that I would always remember that moment. Remembering depends on having forgotten first, or, as the narrator asserts in Time Regained, “the true paradises are the paradises we have lost” (VII.261). Looking at the pictures of lichen, I feel like the Minutemen from the Disney+ show Loki, who are a group of time police who work for some time gods or something (I’m only one episode in, so my understanding is limited). Anyway, they go around scanning objects for their “temporal aura” as a way of telling if anyone’s been travelling through time. When I ‘scan’ the pictures in my Google photos, there’s no temporal aura, unless it’s an accidental encounter that allows my memory to create an aura. If you feel an aura of the past in my pictures of the lichen, that’s a product of my writing or my placement of the pictures on a website, which is to say my imagination, or your imagination, or both together. But it is not a product of the pictures themselves.

♦♦♦

After leaving the two walls behind, I walked past the Reading Room - an oceanfront club and restaurant, and the only restaurant my family ever goes to Maine - and into the Hartley Mason Preserve, which is a park . The Reading Room was setting up a tent for the fourth of July, which reminded me of the tent they set up for my wedding in 2019. There were often weddings in the park when I walked through as a child, and I’m sure that plenty of people were surprised to find an oblivious adolescent wearing a life jacket, a sunhat and a knife wandering through their wedding photos. When my wife and I were married in this park, I remember being irrationally hopeful that a young sailor would walk through. On the day with my camera, there were no weddings in the park, so I stopped and took a picture from where we were married, as well as a few from the beds of damp daylilies. After the park, I crossed over the road to the beach, then walked past several large B&Bs down the side of Stage Neck Rd, until the intersection with the Fisherman’s Walk. Here, walking alongside the harbor, I could see my destination: Agamenticus Yacht Club.

Despite its name, there were no yachts at AYC. Its ancient dinghies and cluttered one-room clubhouse/storage locker made the place feel like the underdog summer camp that eventually defeats the rich kids’ camp across the lake. That said, AYC’s members were quite wealthy; they just assumed a shabby gentility during the summer, and besides, whenever we raced against other yacht clubs, many of which had sumptuous club houses and actual yachts, we inevitably lost badly. But AYC was my second home in Maine, and as I got older, my first home. I started in the Beginner’s class at 8, began to work as an instructor-in-training at 15, and left as the race coach when I was 20.  Most of the staff at AYC had similar trajectories; we were graduates of the sailing program, highly unprofessional, and much less interested in teaching sailing classes than driving the launches too fast, flirting with each other, and filling up the radio channels with inanity. In this regard, I was a partial exception; though I was just as unprofessional as the rest, I enjoyed teaching the kids, and ended up becoming a teacher due to this experience. That said, it’s difficult to be sure of these kinds of causal assertions across long periods of time. No one experience causes any other directly; the routes we take in life cross and fork due to occurrences so subtle and unpredictable as to make retrospective analysis much more fiction than fact.

I didn’t want to go down to take pictures on the AYC dock. My students - the youngest of whom are well into college - have all left the program, and there’s something mortifying about the alum who checks to see if their name is still carved into the dorm room wardrobe.  Promising the kids living there now that they’re revisiting the name to make a point about the uselessness of such gestures is no defense; you have to grow out of caring about that sort of thing, or if you can’t, just imagine it’s still there. Instead, I went around the edge of the Harbor to the small spillway into which the tidal Stage Neck pond - where my grandfather claimed to have learned to swim among lobsters, sea urchins and broken glass - pours in and out of the Harbor twice daily. The spillway forms a concrete platform, and I can see AYC and most of the harbor.  There is an instructor shepherding a class of younger sailors out of their boats; another instructor is bringing members to and from some of the moored boats in the harbor. I took a few pictures, but I knew even then these ones weren’t going to be successful, a feeling confirmed later when I edited them. The same is true of some long-exposures; a couple of them are good photos, and while I could locate something about the flow of time in the swirling water (long-exposures create a feeling of timelessness by averaging moments into a smooth flow), I think they’re mostly just good pictures. There’s nothing of the past in them; perhaps photography is no match for the ceaseless progression of time. 

I sat down to have a sip of water and wonder about what I’m going to do for my Proust project. I was only a couple books in; there was still plenty of time for something to come up that I can photograph. Maybe I could write something about the lichen, I thought. In the midst of these reflections, a common term alighted on a piling near me, and I took a few pictures of that, which was a pleasant reminder that I was only moonlighting as a art photographer; most of the time, I just take pictures of birds.  Later on that day, I went on a boat ride with my sister and my wife, and we took a bunch of silly pictures of each other getting bounced around in the boat, and I also got a few good ones of some cormorants, some seascapes, and the bell buoy.

If any pictures are going to set off the time police’s scanners, it’s these, though I don’t think they have an aura just yet. They don’t remind me of my childhood, but they’re good pictures, not too governed by my intent as an artist, not too closed-off from the atmospheres - social and otherwise - present in those moments, and some of them are pretty interesting to look at as well. They feel balanced and healthy. At some point in the future, I think they might remind me of that day in southern Maine. This is especially true if I don’t put them on Google Photos. If I printed them out and put them in a book I don’t open often - say my copy of Paradise Lost from my first semester of graduate school - I might feel something powerful if I stumble upon them again. Thinking about it now, this might even work if I slipped a few pictures of lichen in there. If I can forget that I tried to take these pictures to recapture my childhood, and just see them as records of my impressions on that day a few weeks ago, perhaps I might discover a bit of authentic temporal aura has inadvertently spilled onto them as well. I don’t want to take this argument too far; of course it isn’t true that memory must be involuntary; we intentionally remember things all the time. The experience of writing this project has demonstrated to me as clearly as any critical analysis that Proust’s memories in In Search of Lost Time are at least partially constructed for the purposes of writing a good book. Proust’s “paradises we have lost” are at least somewhat mythical. The same is true of my pictures; I’m perfectly capable of loading them with resonance borrowed from the memories of my childhood, and in fact I’ve done so throughout this piece, even if I was hesitant to do so in the case of the lichen wall. Perhaps all I’ve learned here is that photography isn’t immune to the ravages of time or the limitations of memory. That said, like anything else, it can resist the passage of time and transport us back to the past; not often, not reliably, and usually by accident, but sometimes it can.