A camera is just a tool?

[dan denmark]

in Queensland, Australia (up north where it is warm, the Florida of Oz), high school kids finishing year 12 go to the Queensland coast for a week to unwind and party hard, called Schoolies Week. the older men who pray on young slightly inebriated high school girls are called Toolies. all they make is trouble.

back to cameras. by design, tools are for making things, ie cameras for photogrpahs, but very often if you visit an historical museum you will see old beautifully preserved tools hanging in display cabinets and even rare and certainly distinguised new ones archived as remarkable examples of a technology or era, side by side for comparison.

they are both.

-dd

 

[benedictjames]

Is your heart only a tool?

The shutter is the camera's eyelid, but also your own, for it opens up to the world in front of it in a meaningful way only when we do.

We invest cameras with our energies, so they become part of us. They take on meaning, as do lots of 'things' or 'tools' - like beautiful cars and buildings. Transport; shelter; a mere means to a picture? Of course! Something more? More than a good chance.

Cameras are creations - just like the pictures they help make. Then when in our hands, they compel us to create with them and through them. They become our guide, and our companion - even our friend. Giving them our love is effortless.

I ran out of film at an event last year. The only available THING nearby was a disposable. It quickly became my friend, losing its mere 'thing-ness', in an instant! Its value beyond plastic and paper became very apparent, and with me, and me through it, created priceless memories - including the memory of the camera itself doing just that! That camera was much more than 'a camera'. Any camera - any THING - can be the same in that regard.

Why are many man hours also put into creating meaningful and worthwhile things AROUND cameras if mere tools they are? Is RFF then a meaningless tool too - just a functional means to impart functional information? Do we who participate do so because cameras are just tools, or because they are much more besides? 'The camera' - as part of 'the person' - makes it, and makes it so. There is no detachment there. RFF is about 'cameras and us' in that way. Because the latter has soul, the former is never divested of it.

Our material is never immaterial. The whole visible universe IS material, including our visible selves. Light itself is material. We connect with ALL material beyond just touch and other physical senses, and therefore everything - including the camera - becomes something more than just connected with our bodies when looked at, picked up, and used.

Like the camera, any part of the material realm becomes a soulless tool only when we do.