The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I've had a post brewing for the past few weeks, but I haven't quite gotten it to come together.  Instead, I get distracted looking at photographs like this:

This is a picture of my daughter sitting on my feet and my son sitting with his feet in between her feet and both of them laughing. I'm laughing, too, which is why this isn't maybe exactly in focus.

Focus shmocus.

Sometimes I think about what photography is now, and what it will be in the future.  I think about how it might become more rigid, or more flexible.  I think about how cameras in phones have made the whole photography world so topsy turvy.  I think about how much easier it is for me to be present and enjoy a moment and still capture a beautiful image--without reaching for a large DSLR.  

 Do you ever think about that?  A cell phone is damn near ubiquitous today; tiny cellphone cameras, therefore, exist along side us nearly everywhere we go.  No one has to remember to carry a separate camera, or race to find a camera, or stick a big, intrusive lens and flash in your face.  A small, effective camera is with you all the time.  You don't have to have a break in the action in order to capture it.  

I appreciate that about technology.  Seamless integration is more than efficient--it's transformative.  My kids don't flinch or react or rethink or retract or withdraw when I pull out my handy iPhone (and, sometimes with my large DSLR setup, they do).  They stay immersed in where they are.  I don't have to pull out of the moment to become BIG FANCY PHOTOGRAPHER.  I stay where I am, and I still get to take a photograph, just the same.  

This makes me think of Muriel Barbery's book, a book whose title I borrowed as a consequence of my own postmodern habit of pastiche :).  In her book, she effectively investigates not just the elegance of that which is unexpectedly graceful, but also the grace of that which is unexpectedly elegant.  Does that makes sense?  I think, today, I am amazed at the elegance of something that is unexpectedly graceful.  I think of cellphones as many things: invasive, meddlesome, loud, aggravating, and addictive.  But what grace!  How they allow the device to also, at times, disappear into its own function!  An iPhone is elegant in design, to be sure, but graceful--truly a "courteous goodwill; or an attractively polite manner of behaving"--that is a shockingly different characterization for me.  (I don't deny, you know, being an iPhone addict.)

I will think about that the next time I use any camera.  Does this camera place itself in between me and my subject, or does it gracefully enter the background because of its own elegant ubiquity?

 Here's hoping you pick up your cameraphone and capture something in the moment, of the moment. --xo