Notes From A Weekend In Southern Baptist Country
- Walking around in the hot sun wearing a suit and tie and carrying around heavy bags of camera equipment will make you aware of how out of shape you are.
- On the other hand, if you have the camera bug you don’t notice that, until the day after, when your legs start telling you all about how much work they were doing the day before.
- Taking photos of young couples in love is fun, and never fails to warm the heart. After a few hours of seeing so much happiness and joy all around you, you almost forget that they and everyone in the party would all vote to take away your own ability to marry without giving it a second thought.
- No trip to visit the Southern Baptist side of your family tree is complete without a lecture on the bible and hellfire.
- While driving south of the Potomac, you can add to your Jack Chick collection by checking the top of the toilet paper dispensers in the men’s room stalls everywhere you stop for a bladder break. I found two Chick tracts this trip that I didn’t have.
- I am helping out with small tasks before the wedding, and I see arriving family members gathering around my Mercedes. They are peeking though the windows and pointing to this and that around the grill. The headlight washers seem to fascinate them. One person touches the little three pointed star hood ornament lightly. I’d given Traveler a good washing that morning so it would look its best for the wedding. Now I’ve been given signs to plant near the entrance to the parking lots, directing folks to the gazebo where the wedding will take place, and to the reception hall, and as I walk past on my way to the entrance they ask me about the car. Yes, it’s a new model Mercedes. Yes, it drives really nice. Yes, I’m a very happy owner. Yes, I know that kids like to steal the hood ornament. No, I didn’t know they were wearing them as necklaces nowadays. They ask me about the odd little doors just below the headlights. Oh, says I, those are where the headlight washers pop out. I explain that they work only when the headlights are on, and only with the first, and then each tenth squirt of the wiper washer button. One of them jokes that since it’s a German car, they’d thought the little doors might have been for machine guns.
- I think it’s a good sign when you see the happy marrieds-to-be being playful with each other during the rehearsal, and the reception and not all dire and serious. They gather together at the wedding cake to do the cake cutting ceremony, and he looks into her eyes and says ‘I just want you to know I love you’ and she gives him a look back and says she loves him too, and they cut the cake together and then just before they each take a bite they both mash cake into each others faces laughing delightedly. And then of course they’re all affectionately wiping each other’s faces off and share another kiss.
- Ever since puberty I’ve always felt somewhat detached from all the life I see going on around me, and I know that’s mostly what prejudice and hate have done to me and I hate it. But I also know it’s given my photographic eye its distinctive voice, and honed my skill as a photographer. To get the very best shots you need to concentrate on what you are seeing. You can’t be a part of the moment and do that. You have to step back from it, which is easy if you’ve never really felt like you were part of most things to begin with.
I took just under six-hundred shots on the digital camera, and roughly another sixty with the Hasselblad. After I got back home I imported the digital shots into Aperture and gave them a once-over, feeling a strange kind of perfect joy in being able to capture a few really expressive moments of love and happiness that I’ll probably never experience myself. It’s looking like I’ll be going into that long night never having a wedding of my own. But as I studied my shoot last night it didn’t feel as though I was living it vicariously through someone else’s. In the end everything a photographer does, regardless of who they do it for, is a personal statement, and I really believe in love. I think this is what most of my friends just don’t get. I really believe in it. By all rights I shouldn’t, considering that love doesn’t seem to even know I exist. And yet I do.
So the blissful pleasure I took in doing that wedding shoot was genuine. All the more so as the newlyweds seem to have between them exactly the kind of playful romance I’ve always searched for. It was a pure pleasure to capture some images of it. But also genuine was the grief I drove home with, and which I knew would be waiting for me when I got done importing and examining my shoot last night. This is the other thing my friends just don’t get: how much of my day is spent dealing with grief. Problem is, at age 54, drink and cigars aren’t making me forget it anymore. All that did for me last night was remind me how old I’m getting…how far beyond my ‘use by’ date I am…
