photos (of Venice and in general)

In trying to sync my hard drive with my flash drive, I accidentally deleted all of my photos from Venice. Yes, every last one, plus the ones from earlier this week including a few of mosses that I took on a morning walk on Tuesday after we had returned home.

My initial response: I am dissapointed--I hadn't even looked at them again since the trip last week. And yet, my next response is that this is really funny. I had taken so many photos, had wanted to collect so many images to use as artwork material, as well as to show to friends, and now there's no way to get them back. There's no need to argue with it, the past is now the past. Ironically, this is how it would have been if I didn't have a camera at all in the first place, which puts all of this into an interesting perspective. In terms of deriving and just being a tourist in general, it is really a memory map that I have left now, with no "objective" traces to help me reconstruct my experiences.

This also makes me think about the act of taking pictures differently. I spent so much time collecting things I saw with a camera that I wonder whether my experience in Venice was more about experiencing Venice or about trying to remember it while I was still there. And that's just funny. It's something I was very aware of in, say, India, when I knew I didn't want to be behind a camera all the time, but Venice was a little different--it's almost as though it's so filled with tourists I didn't question taking photos at all. In a way, it makes me think, poor Venice. To be a city where people just come and take photos of your beautiful buildings and canals and light, then leave, not staying around to know you better, just get a dose of Venetian beauty, take it, collect it, preserve it so you can say "oh look at this beautiful canal, do you remember when we were in beautiful Venice?" and go--how it must feel to be stolen (in a sense) like that.

Now what I'm left with are my memories and drawings, which in a way feel more meaningful to me now. Pictures are nice, but they don't capture what happened on our derives, not really because what happened happened in me and between me and the other derivers and between us and the city. No photograph can capture what it felt like to weave in and out, follow the flow of the group (because we did flow, like a river, down the alleyways and then ebb when we had to choose a new direction, only to flow once more, mirroring a river's movements). After not looking at the photos for a week after the trip, I realize that I hardly remember what any of them were of, but I do remember a lot of what I saw, and whether the two would have matched up or not, I do not know. I do know that my memory would have been reshaped by the photos because they would remind me of things that I'm sure I have forgotten--be that a good or a bad thing, I don't really know. In a way, it is freeing to not have them anymore. I just don't have to worry about them. They're gone. Time to move on.

So. moving on.