Despite having visited more than 50 countries, ROSITA BOLANDdoesn't take photographs to remind her of where she has been. In a world obsessed with seeing everything through a lens, isn't it enough to simply live in the moment?
I’VE RECENTLY come back from a week in Mexico and, as usual, I don’t have any photographs of my time there or of the friends I was with. In fact, I don’t have a single picture of any of the 50-plus countries in seven continents that I’ve travelled to over almost nine years. And I only have a handful of photographs of landmark events – birthdays, graduations, parties, weddings, christenings – which I was given by friends or family members. I don’t own a camera.
At 14, I was given a little camera with a box of blue-cubed flashes and used up the entire film photographing the family Christmas dinner. I didn’t touch the camera again until I went to Australia right after university.
Dazzled by the strange otherness of a vast landscape, I took several rolls of film, but didn’t develop any of them. I think it was because everything seemed too huge to even attempt to capture visually – the Nullarbor Plain that went on for days, the bright, deep night skies, the abstract, unphotographable extent of my happiness as I began to explore the world outside Ireland.
Much later, when I started working as a journalist, I wrote an article about a subject that had intrigued me all my life: how do people who have been blind from birth imagine what the world looks like? One young man told me that he still could not understand perspective. How, he marvelled, could something as large as a mountain fit into a single camera frame? I understood him exactly.
As the years passed and I still did not use a camera to record my travels and life experiences, I slowly realised that what had begun as something accidental and unpremeditated had gradually turned into a kind of alternative perspective on the process of memory.
It was not that I was uninterested in photography, or knew nothing about it. You cannot work as a print journalist without learning a great deal about press photography by osmosis, any more than you can fail to recognise the elements that make some pictures truly great when you study several newspapers every day.
But when it comes to my own life, I have no desire to photograph what I see or experience around me. I prefer simply to observe, to live undistracted and purely in the moment and let memory later filter back what it will, and surprise me.
I dislike generalities, but I think it is true to guess that very few tourists these days go to Antarctica without a camera. On my ship that left Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, for Antarctica two years ago, I was the only one. Everyone else took thousands of digital pictures, and edited them at night. They were all action. I just stared, half-stunned, all day long at everything I saw in that clear, stark and unearthly world of ice, where colour was absent and the past appeared to seamlessly fuse with the present.
It was the strangest, remotest and most surreally beautiful place I will ever see. And I will never be there again. Some journeys truly are once-in-a-lifetime.
Now we have digital photography, many people travel with at least one camera, a handy pocket-sized point-and-snap, or a larger, more demanding piece of equipment. Thus my lack of any camera (apart from the one on my phone, which I have by default and never use) in this newish digital era is usually eventually noticed and queried in a way it was not 20 – or even 10 – years ago. It intrigues people. They’re curious about the why.
One question I’m frequently asked is, do I regret not having any travel pictures? I have travelled to many photogenic places without taking pictures – most memorably Burma, Iran, Pakistan, the Galapagos, Japan and Nepal – but Antarctica is the place I get asked most about concerning the lack of photographs.
The truthful answer is I do not regret having no photos. I believe one can never really possess anything in life except the experience of the lived moment. I was lucky enough to be in Antarctica and so many other places throughout the world: how then could I ever unknow that experience?
Besides, travel is only a part of one’s life, no matter how much you do or how large a space it occupies in your consciousness and sensibility (as it certainly does in mine). My interior camera, I suppose, is in the hard-drive of my head. But I think people are especially curious about my lack of travel pictures because time spent travelling, by definition, is so different from our ordinary lives, and so an absence of any visual record of this time seems particularly striking.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given my aversion to using a camera, I detest being the subject of a lens. For years, a friend half-jokingly displayed a picture of me with a napkin over my face since she reckoned this was my most representative image. For the sake of politeness and in an attempt not to be anti-social, I can now manage a strained smile for an absolutely necessary – to others – group picture, but usually no more than one. After that, I slink away unnoticed. It’s a useful trick I learned as a journalist: how to make yourself unobtrusive and almost invisible in a room and be simultaneously present.
I have only one framed picture of people in my house: a black and white shot of my parents on their wedding day. It hangs beside the front door, so I see it every day. It’s a beautiful, joyous photograph of two people at the beginning of their lives together and, perfectly, it’s enough. I don’t need another picture of them. I can’t explain in words why that is.
It simply is. When the uncle who was as a grandfather to me died five years ago, we laid him on out on his bed, and waked him at home in Galway for two nights. My aunt unexpectedly and disconcertingly handed me a camera and asked if I would photograph him. For the first time in many years, I held a camera for longer than the one shot that passing tourists routinely request of you in locations around the world. I photographed details first – the worn soles of his shoes, his still-defiant smudge of a moustache at age 96, the texture of his favourite tweed jacket – and then parts of his body until I stood on a chair, concentrated hard, and took a picture of his entire prone, dead self. I did it for my aunt and she now carries those photographs with her, but I have never looked at them, and never will.
I understand why she wants to have those pictures close to her, but I don’t need to see them myself. I could no more forget my lost uncle than a tree can continue to grow without retaining its tight interior rings: he was an integral part of my life, all my life.
IN JUNE THIS YEAR, I broke the habit of a lifetime. I bought three disposable cameras in a drugstore and used them to photograph doors in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I spent the last academic year at Harvard on a journalism fellowship, and had there – to date – the happiest year of my life.
In the days before I left, I photographed entrances to the classrooms, lecture theatres, libraries, cocktail bars, restaurants, and apartments of friends I frequented daily for months. I liked the idea of doors representing those spaces through which I passed to learn so much, and where I had so many wonderful times and life-changing experiences. The doors as portals to memory.
I got them developed the week I returned home. My experiment in photography was the one disappointment of my year. Soon I’ll throw the pictures away. What was I expecting? I think in some way I wanted to imagine myself there again by looking at the photographs, but I finally realised something I should have learned years ago – that you can never return to the past. There is only the lived moment.
BATTERED PASSPORT
June 1994 - June 2004
CAMBODIA January 2005
My pass to the temples of Angkor Wat
PAKISTAN April 1994
Rudyard Kipling’s father was a curator here
JAPAN November 2002
Bullet train at 300km an hour
BURMA March 2003
I rented a telescope to look at the jewels on top
ANTARCTICA November 2007
The ship that took me to the white continent
CUBA February 2008
The most expensive Mojito in Cuba
