FOOTPATHS

Walking Life, with Camera

Now that I’m in my 50s, I take a walk most days. My joints are too creaky for running, so walking a mile or two covers the necessary cardiovascular bases. After a year or so of daily walks, the nearby paths were familiar and walking itself became increasingly dull. In the fall and winter, I found excuses not to go — too cold, too dark, too slippery, can’t find my gloves. In the spring and summer, I rushed through the walk, turning it into a march. Walking was becoming just exercise.

Last Christmas though, I got a new camera and made a New Year’s resolution to learn how to use it. When I walked in the winter, I occasionally took the camera along to get some practice. But in the summer, I started taking the camera every day. It’s changed the way I walk.
I take longer, more meandering walks down new streets, alleys, trails, and paths. I look at things differently and I see new things.

I look for visual jokes, metaphors, and juxtapositions and I find a grocer’s apostrophe (“Life has it’s moments…”), an exclusive restaurant with the sign “Closed. Please enter to make reservations,” and Obama posters in the windows above a gift shop called Perfect Solutions.

My city seems different. Ashland is in Southern Oregon, a former mill town, with a Shakespeare festival and a state university, and that’s where I work. But I’ve learned much more about my town by wandering among its visual details. I’ve learned that the 93-acre city park was designed by the architect who built the Golden Gate Bridge and that our city band is the oldest in the country. I’ve learned why the railroad is defunct. I’ve walked up the street where Nabokov wrote Lolita and through the cemetery where Erskine Caldwell is buried.

I take pictures of the statues, murals, and memorials. I notice the gargoyle face embossed in the fountain in the city plaza. I’m fascinated by a metal grate behind the Elks Lodge with the word “CHARITY” soldered into its grillwork. I take photos of art cars decorated with day-glow paint, glued-on plastic toys, and Tinkerbell wings. Geography and fauna have a new interest as well. The mountains, peaks, and rock formations all have names and I want to know them. I see a butterfly on the mirrored window of the post office. I visit the duck pond on a Sunday morning and learn how feeding the ducks leads to overcrowding and ecological breakdown.

Mostly, people are different. I used to walk with a prison-yard expression perfected as a Manhattan commuter. Now people are no longer just traffic. They are hurried, bored, waiting, lost, or jaywalking. I see action, drama, and character everywhere as construction sites become ballets of fluorescent yellow and orange and the skateboard park becomes a circus of flight and tumbling.

As I photograph them, some people ask what I am doing (“Just learning to use my camera,” I reply). A group of teenagers mug and ask, “What is this for?” Out-of-towners make requests. “Take one of my husband on his scooter,” a tourist commands. I meet friends happy to be subjects (“No paparazzi!” jokes a musician friend, covering his face). I happen upon a photographer taking pre-wedding pictures in front of a downtown hotel. As she takes pictures of the bride in her gown, I take pictures of them. Soon both are posing.

My walks make me think. Is it all right to photograph strangers? Some seem to assume that I have some official role, but should I be asking permission? It seems wrong to photograph some subjects — the homeless, the helpless, and the hurting. And photographing children will surely frighten parents. On the other hand, some people are fair game: people lounging in public, street musicians, people talking on cell phones while they walk.

Sometimes you have to frame the picture to know. I took a series of photos at an artisans’ market one Sunday. Some vendors posed for the camera, some coolly ignored it, and some slept in the summer heat. Most of the sleepers had just nodded off but one was so deeply asleep with her head thrown back and arms dangling that it would have been a violation to take the picture. The same day, I saw two tourists with their heads in hands sitting on the curb near a bank. What was wrong? Had they lost their money? I ended up taking their picture because the scene suggested too much to pass up.

My walks now are rich in humanity. They are rich in history, geography, and found art. And they are rich in questions. Walking with a camera has made me more aware and more curious. It’s helping my heart in more ways than one.

Edwin Battistella lives in Ashland, OR. His latest book is Do You Make These Mistakes in English: The Story of Sherwin Cody’s Famous Language School and is published by Oxford University Press. Battistella can be contacted at battiste@sou.edu.