The Conscious Act of Choosing not to Document

We stayed in an apartment in La Ciotat. The floors were checkered black and white and the walls were fairly sparse save for a couple of postcard reminiscent prints. There was a small bookshelf and a copy of Albert Camus La Peste and I nearly took it but left it behind. Two balconies book-ended the space. My favorite albeit the one we spent less time on had a rose bush taking up residence along its edge. I can recall this pink rose bush shakily as though in my mind I took a picture that might resemble the one I would have taken on my film camera. It was probably sometime around then that I realized that certain memories might only be sacred if they were mine completely and not owned in part by my camera roll or even my beloved and well travelled Minolta. 

It is still something that I grapple with as I have both this profound love for documenting most unimportant moments but simultaneously relishing in the privacy of not. Visiting the Louvre you are encapsulated by a crowds of people with their arms elevated. I mostly chose to sit or to stand. I do not believe that I am better (or any less guilty) of removing myself from the present by quietly angling and framing a good shot. And I understand the ache to mark oneself as having seen it or done it. Perhaps it tags along with a stronger need to disconnect entirely. To be on the left bank and greedily eat up the very thought that Simone de Beauvoir had also walked this very way. 

In the moment it was liberating. There is one particular instance that comes back with some clarity. I was sitting at the highest point of an amphitheatre on the bordering wall. I was entirely alone and I looked across the arena and watched as the few other visitors wove through the building. But I sat there in the warmth with the breeze. Nimes hugged the structure and subsequently me, as well. I took no photos and I can recall even now that feeling of solitude. But to the rest of the world did it even happen? And what does it matter now that you know it did? I am in limbo both wishing I had something to commemorate yet also relieved that I don’t. 

Yet the documentation is important. It proves that there is life and community and love in your midst. J. and I had a habit of sharing a drink at the end of the week on a bench beside Aix’s most grandiose fountain. I am glad that that is immortalized. Or the first time we went for a glass of wine with I and J.G. These were times in our lives seemingly insignificant frames that now upon reflection are sacred. 

There is a fear of both succumbing to my own interpretations of memory while also releasing it into the world giving it a frame in which it can be lived and reinterpreted by anyone who encounters it. More likely than not, I will continue to document, to photograph and write because to hold these moments is to also hold the people and places which are inseparable from myself. But to know that when I do no snap the picture that it is there, in my mind hung up in just the way I want it.