The Camera as a Permission Slip

By Aurora Spellweaver

I bought my first real camera at a pawn shop on Divisadero in 1994, which is not the kind of origin story they write in photography magazines, but it is the truth. The man behind the counter, who had a tattoo of a mermaid on his forearm that had clearly been drawn by someone who had never seen either a mermaid or a forearm, said "that one's got fungus in the lens" and knocked fifteen dollars off the price. I walked out with a fungusy Nikon and a conviction I didn't fully understand yet: that the camera was not a tool for making art. It was a permission slip for paying attention. The Sacred Rights of Rubbernecking Here is something nobody tells you about being a spiritual consultant: half the job is just noticing things other people have trained themselves to ignore. The other half is not being weird about it. A camera does both of these things at once. When you raise a viewfinder to your

eye, you are telling the universe — and more importantly, yourself — that this particular slant of light at 4:17 PM on a Tuesday is worth stopping for. That is a theological statement. It is also the reason I have 14,000 photographs in my Lightroom catalog and exactly 37 that I would show another human being. The jester in every tradition is the one who gets to say what everyone else is thinking but won't admit. The photographer, in a quieter way, is the one who gets to say what everyone else is seeing but won't stop for. Both of them require a certain kind of permission. Both of them are, at their core, acts of love dressed up as nosiness. What the Fog Taught Me About Focus San Francisco fog is not subtle. It arrives like a personality, swallows the Golden Gate Bridge whole, and then hangs around as if waiting for a thank-you. I spent my first three years here trying to photograph

around it — waiting for clear days, cursing the gray, treating weather like an obstacle instead of a collaborator. Then one morning near Lands End I gave up, pointed the lens into the fog, and discovered that fog is just light that has decided to be shy. The photographs from that morning are still some of my favorites. Not because they're technically impressive — a few are, a few are just gray rectangles with vague suggestions of cypress trees — but because they mark the moment I stopped fighting the conditions and started asking what the conditions had to teach me. This is, now that I think about it, also the story of my entire spiritual life. I did not find clarity by chasing clarity. I found it by finally admitting that I was, and remain, mostly confused, mostly curious, and only occasionally right about anything. Butterflies, Hailstorms, and the Problem with Signs Last month I was

sitting under an oak tree in Golden Gate Park when a swarm of butterflies surrounded me. I'm not being poetic. Actual butterflies. They landed on my arms, my knees, the brim of my hat. I sat there for what felt like ten minutes and was probably forty-five seconds, and then they dispersed as if someone had rung a tiny butterfly bell. I did not have my camera. This is, of course, the punchline. When I tell people this story, they want to know what it meant . Was it a sign? A message? An omen? And the honest answer — the jester answer — is that I don't know. I think the butterflies were just being butterflies, which is already miraculous enough. I think meaning is something we bring to the world, not something the world hands us on a silver platter. The camera has taught me this too: a photograph doesn't mean anything until someone looks at it. The looking is the meaning. The showing up,

the paying attention, the absurd willingness to sit in a park waiting for something you can't name — that is the whole practice. The butterflies are just the universe's way of saying "you were already here. Good job." Wanderlaugh and the Long Exposure I recently acquired a vintage VW van. It is rainbow-colored. It makes a noise like a whale with a head cold. I named it Wanderlaugh, which is either the best or the worst decision I've made this year, and I am planning to drive it across the country on something I'm calling the Laugh and Light Tour. The premise is simple: photograph what I find, perform where I'm invited, and trust that the road knows more than I do. The van is also, I should admit, a kind of permission slip. It's bigger and louder and harder to park than a camera, but it serves the same function: it gives me an excuse to do the thing I was going to do anyway — wander

around looking at the world — while appearing to have a plan. This is a trick the ego loves. Tell yourself you're on a cross-country clown tour and suddenly the part where you're just a guy who likes to drive slowly through small towns and stare at interesting fences becomes a project . The camera taught me this trick first. Wanderlaugh is just scaling it up. The Light Always Wins, Eventually Here is what I know after thirty years of pointing lenses at things: the light always wins. You can try to control it — aperture, shutter speed, ISO, a dozen little technical decisions that feel like mastery — but the light will do what it does regardless. Your job is not to dominate it. Your job is to be ready when it arrives. This is also true of joy. It is also true of grief, and laughter, and whatever it was that made you buy a camera from a pawn shop in 1994 when you could have spent that money

on something sensible. The best photograph I ever took was of my neighbor's cat sitting on a windowsill at exactly the moment the afternoon sun made her look like a minor deity. I was not trying to take a great photograph. I was just walking home, camera in hand, because walking home with a camera in hand was the only way I knew how to walk home. So here is my advice, which you did not ask for and which I am therefore delighted to give: carry a camera. Or don't. Carry a notebook, a pair of binoculars, a small bag of almonds, an unreasonable amount of curiosity. The tool doesn't matter. What matters is the permission — the quiet, daily, slightly ridiculous decision to treat the world like it might be worth looking at. Because it is. It absolutely, absurdly, inexplicably is.