Picture perfect

The one and only time I visited Grand Canyon, at the age of 16, I took a bunch of photos. None of them came out well. Not because I didn’t focus correctly, or couldn’t figure out how to frame the shots properly, but because the magnitude of the experience just wasn’t something one could properly capture.

I am having a bit of that issue now.

I am in the Colombian Andes, and the lushness, grandeur, and breathtaking beauty of the landscape are not registering on my measly phone camera. You are just going to have to trust me: it’s pretty darn cool. (The photo is from Hacienda Venecia, where I learned why I like cheap coffee. Short version: capitalism).

My initial frustration with the flat photos I am taking made me think about how much we are used to living through what we could call “the immediacy of delayed gratification.” We prefer to experience something through photographing it — ideally with ourselves in the frame — rather than just being in the present. And after we take selfie after selfie, we spend the rest of our time flicking through them, even as whatever we are experiencing is going on right in front of us and around us. In short, it seems that we would do almost anything not to be in the moment. It’s kinda heartbreakingly funny and more than a little bit sad.

When I experienced Grand Canyon, the photographs I took were not immediately visible to me. I didn’t know until months after, when I developed my films, that the shots just didn’t read majestic and vast. But I carried that feeling with me regardless, because I had been in it, absorbed it, only temporarily distracted by a lens.

And so on reflection, maybe my inability to take reasonable shots of Manizales and surroundings is not really all that bad.

I have put my phone away.

I will stop trying.

The impossibly green mountains, the convocations of eagles circling the sky, the clouds so near you can almost touch them… You’ll just have to trust me.