Brain Food #722
Where life happens
Thoughts of the day
In a 2013 interview, photography critic Sean O’ Hagan expressed his regret at not having taken more photos with the family’s old camera, but also his regret at not having seen the opportunities it was offering:
“I remember a Kodak Instamatic that appeared every time we went on holiday or had a family gathering. The rest of the time it resided in the “everything drawer” in the kitchen, alongside lightbulbs, batteries, pieces of string, marker pens, clothes pegs and all the other detritus of family life. The idea that it could be taken out, loaded up with cheap film and used to record my everyday life never occurred to me. This is now a source of deep regret.”
— Sean O’Hagan
O’Hagan also references Ed Ruscha, how some of his photo series eventually became a record of change in rural America, and how he could have easily done the same, had he been open to seeing that the change around him was something worth capturing.
Partly springing from our need to save some things for ‘special occasions’ (and our tendency to always live in the future), partly from our busyness which can make us overlook the fact that what is special is right before our eyes, we might be spending too little time looking and not seeing.
And the forgotten Instamatic in the drawer also surfaces another question: what is it that you are not using today that you might regret later?
Photo of a kitchen counter with tomatoes, by William Eggleston, the master of the everyday, where life happens.
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