trigger happy

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.

- "At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay Close to Focus" (NYTimes)

My biggest pet peeve: loud tour groups that crowd museums. That, and people who stand on the left on escalators. Don't even get me started.

The great thing about living in DC is that I don't feel the pressure to go through a (free!) Smithsonian in one visit. Realistically, based on my museum-going habits, I know that I will probably never actually make it back for a second visit or spend more than two hours in one museum at a time, but it's a nice thing to tell myself.

Whenever I bring my camera somewhere, though, I'm always torn between wanting to "capture" a moment, that I'll be able to look back on forever, or "experience" a moment, that I'll hopefully be able to remember forever. To me, art is about emotions and photos about feelings; they serve to frame both a moment and a mindset. But so often I find myself becoming guilty of simply being trigger happy, of living life behind the lens rather than in front of it, of collecting frames rather than experiencing moments, and of taking photos whose only purpose is to prove that "I was there."

Even if I wasn't really "there."