On buying a new camera

I recall a fragment that I had written years ago: “A new pair of glasses, a new lease on life.”

There’s another essay in this somewhere about the fraught relationship I have with my eyes, my hemming and hawing over whether to have lenses implanted, about the anxiety of surgical enhancement, transhumanism and technological dependence. But that’s for another time.

This note is about buying a new camera. Buying a new way of seeing, a new way of eliciting meaning from the world. For better or for worse.

Let me put this up front, an unavoidable tension. On the one hand, the consumerist trap, “I buy, therefore I am”, but, on the other, – and assuming today’s specialised division of labour – if I do not buy, I am less than I could be.

What has helped me navigate this tension is the concept of “focal things”, set against a “device” (ideas developed by Albert Borgmann). See LM Sacasas:

Availability is a characteristic of technology which answers to technology’s promise of liberation and enrichment. Something is technologically available, Bormann explains, “if it has been rendered instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.” At the heart of the device paradigm is the promise of increasing availability.

Borgmann goes on to distinguish between things and devices. While devices tend toward technological availability, what things provide tend not to be instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, or easy. The difference between a thing and a device is a function of the sort of engagement that is required of user.

The thing requires, demands, elicits physical and social engagement. The device smoothens over, sanitises, standardises, un-mediates.

Others have written more persuasively and intelligently about this. I will try instead here to make the case that a camera is a focal thing.

Or rather, can (could?) be. Because it is also equally clear to me that the camera can be a “device” (the antonym of a focal thing). In fact, perhaps, it is first a device that has to be reclaimed as a thing.

Allow me some very broad, very fuzzy pontification. It is arguable that this was not always true. Cameras of the past were idiosyncratic, technical, obscure, dense. Not always good things, but they required a degree of practise, knowledge, humbling. Of course, there are some contemporary cameras that fit this bill. But many cameras today are positioned as making it easy to produce “good” (let’s come back to this) photographs – you, too, can be a creator (ibid) if you buy this camera. And some choices that are made appeal to this – so it isn’t just a “social media” problem, but something that seeps into many other systems too – decisions made to render these cameras legible to the dynamic of social media.

This latent promise of any gear (that it can provide the missing element to your success) is common in many practices. And the commercialisation of good gear it isn’t all bad. In truth, I think it is an undeniable and unqualified good to make better kit available to more people. But in this process, are the people being lifted up, enriched, made more engaged, their lives more textured? Or are they being flattened, compelled by the algorithm and the paths of least resistance encoded in the camera? Is the market making kit more accessible to people, or is the kit making people more accessible to the market?

Do they just end up chasing the magic “recipe”?

Let me come clean now. I bought a Fujifilm X-E5. Did I want a Fujifilm X100VI? Certainly (although I like to comfort/defend myself by noting I had been using the X100S for almost 11 years). And do I use film simulations? You bet. How about the film simulation dial on the X-E5? Yes, I have come to love it very, very much!

So what I say here is not a knock on this technology. But from within this user base, within the hashtags and reels, I feel very keenly the siren song of the device paradigm. I feel it when I read the comments: “What’s the recipe?” I feel it when I compare my work with all those posts online. I feel it when I catch myself going down the rabbit hole, searching madly for the One True Recipe.

The promise, the allure of the Fujifilm: you, too, can have aesthetics at your disposal. The promise of pure style at the ready, delivered straight into your SD card, no hiccup, no problem. Ready for your grid. This clearly tends to be a device.

And yet, it holds the promise of being a thing. As a camera, it is unavoidably technical. Exposure, ISO, aperture, they still matter. Beyond that, I would also argue that the focal-ness of the camera lies less in the aesthetic affordances available, but in how these are employed. While these affordances are most easily understood, or lend themselves most easily to, the device paradigm, this is not inevitable.

Does the camera help you engage more presently with your world, the passage of time? Appreciate your relationships, your place, your life? Or does it move you towards performativity, shallowness, a constant fretting about popularity online?

Does the camera force you to negotiate with the world? To grapple with the scene? Or does it flatten, reducing all that is before you to a mere aesthetic resource to be exploited?

Does the camera make you more present or does it distract? Does it free you or enslave you? Enrich or deprive you?

This, ultimately, is a question of what one’s practice is. A focal practice of photography renders the camera a tool in service of that practice. A device-paradigm practice turns photography into mere aesthetics or GAS – we consume the scene in front of us as a ready-made post rather than as reality. The latter is difficult to escape, if only because the device paradigm is so strong on social media (and hence so addictive). In trying to make ourselves legible to that world, we make our things devices, our practices consumption.

So, a camera can be a focal thing. It can only be a focal thing when integrated into a focal photographic practice. What would that look like? That is the question I am trying to answer here – we’ll see if we can get anywhere close.