Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
I was going to be a writer. Not just any writer, a playwright. Capital P, capital importance. I’d stay up late reading Sam Shepard, convinced I was channeling something profound. That raw, wounded American masculinity, those brothers tearing each other apart in broken-down kitchens. I devoured every word. Then Pinter, those silences, man, those pauses that said more than dialogue ever could. And Pirandello, who understood that reality was just a story we all agreed to pretend was true.
I was insufferable.
I wrote plays that nobody wanted to produce. Bitter, self-indulgent stuff about alienation and authenticity, like the world was waiting for another twenty-something’s take on the meaninglessness of existence. So I pivoted. I started directing. Figured if I couldn’t get my own words staged, I’d interpret someone else’s genius. At least then I’d be in the room where it happened.
And I was good enough. Not great. Good enough to get by, good enough to convince myself I wasn’t failing. I learned about visual composition, about silence and space, about how an image could punch you in the gut faster than a monologue.
That’s when it shifted. The images started mattering more than the words. A frame could tell a story, sometimes better than I ever could with dialogue. I fell into visual storytelling, and suddenly I wasn’t fighting against my own mediocrity anymore. There was something there. Something that felt less like forcing it, less like screaming into the void hoping someone would hear.
I thought I’d figured it out. Thought I’d found my thing.
Then Charlie happened.
He’s about to turn four. Lindsey and I trade off bedtime duties, she gets him one night, I get him the next. It’s supposed to be story time. Me telling him stories. That’s the deal. That’s the routine. Parent performs, child listens, everyone learns a lesson about sharing or bravery or whatever the hell.
Charlie doesn’t play by those rules.
Last night was my night. I laid down, ready to speed my way through some tale about a brave little something-or-other, and before I can even start, he’s off. Just launches into this epic. This saga about fish who ride motorcycles. Not little toy motorcycles. Full-size Harleys. And they’re bad at it. They keep falling over because, you know, fish… slippery mother fuckers.
But then there’s his imaginary friend, BooBooButt, (ah man, BooBooButt’s a whole other story) who lives on the sun, which according to Charlie is “very hot but you get used to it”, and his friend decides to come back to Earth specifically to help these fish. Not because he’s bored, not because he misses Earth. No. He comes back because he sees these fish struggling and thinks, “I can help.”
So he trains them. Teaches them to jump, which fish are pretty good at anyway, but now they’re jumping and racing these motorcycles. And the whole point, the entire reason for this elaborate scheme, is so the fish can win trophies. Prizes and stuff from the races. Because they need a bigger tank. With better and bigger bubbles.
The bubbles are apparently crucial.
I’m laying there, and I’m completely outmatched. This kid is spinning narrative gold out of nothing. No self-consciousness, no second-guessing, no wondering if it makes sense or if anyone will like it. Just pure, unfiltered imagination.
He doesn’t care about structure or stakes or character development. He doesn’t know what those things are. And yet his story has all of them. The fish have motivation. There’s an obstacle. There’s a helper. There’s a goal. It’s Joseph Campbell meets Dr. Seuss, and it’s better than anything I sweated over in my twenties.
He just knows there’s a story, and slippery fish, and big motorcycles, and someone who lives on the sun who gives a damn about good quality bubbles.
Charlie gets it: Just tell the damn story. Don’t ask permission. Don’t apologize.
Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography