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Maybe my last couple posts gave me away, maybe they didn't, but I've been on vacation this past week. My parents flew up and we've been traveling across western Canada in fine style (which is to say, in my car), hitting Prince Albert, Jasper, and Banff National Parks. That list is in chronological order but also probably in the order of park visitation rates, lowest to highest. No matter.

The picture above is of Peyto Lake in Banff. You might be able to tell from the picture--it's a beautiful lake, fed by glacial meltwater, colored an implausibly rich blue. What you can't tell from the picture is how many other pictures exist that look almost exactly like it, but give Peyto Lake a google, and you'll see: it's a place people take pictures of. And it photographs well--some things seem lost when they're transcribed onto film, but the pure blue of this lake doesn't. On the other hand, though, the character of being there--the snow melting on my toes, the golden mantled ground squirrels on the rocks, the other tourists photographing the scene--all of that is lost, and all of that is what makes my experience of the place not precisely the same as everyone else's.

There's a quote from James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the strange exercise in photojournalism he produced with Walker Evans: "If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game." He says what I am trying to say better than I ever could, I think. Photographs don't convey the whole experience, and my words don't fill the gap between the lived reality and the reflected image.

On the other hand, that's okay. On vacation I rather brilliantly managed to shoot 24 exposures of a roll of 35mm film I had not loaded properly (which is to say, even though I was looking through the lens and releasing the shutter, no pictures were exposed), and misplace one or two rolls of 120mm. My foolishness--and it was foolish, and probably due to the fact that I brought no fewer than five cameras along for the trip--didn't make me enjoy my vacation any less. But it was a lost opportunity, not just to record the things I saw, but to make something new out of them. As an object of record a photograph might not be whole, but as a photograph it always is.

My photograph of Peyto Lake is nothing new, though I don't regret taking it. But here's a photograph of Lake Louise, another place that's often committed to film (or, you know, the nebulous digital equivalent). It's no high art. It's just a picture of a Clark's nutcracker in the right place at the right time, and it doesn't capture the entire mad bustle of the dock at Lake Louise, or the funny way Clark's nutcrackers hop, or our quick getaway from the scrum of tourists and the reminder that we ourselves were tourists. That's okay. It's not supposed to. It's tied to a memory for me, and for you--well, it's a piece of something, here it is, make of it what you will.