The Picture of the Peach

To be completely honest, I kind-of, sort-of, hate blogs. Especially food and lifestyle blogs, not wholly unlike the one I attempt here to write. Blogs are, by their very nature, completely self-indulgent, a quality I find universally boring even as I perpetrate it. Many of them are dull— not everyone who blogs can write, and not everyone who writes has something interesting to say. And when they’re not dull, I find them even more irritating.

The best blogs are thoughtfully written and laid out in the spare and elegant fashion of Martha Stewart Living, with wide white margins and brilliant images of everyday objects photographed by the blogger while the afternoon sunlight slants through the window and onto the table just so. They are gems produced by creative geniuses who live in places like Brooklyn, and Seattle and London; people who bake, and travel, and eat long lunches in charming little hole-in-the-wall places you’ve never heard of, and afterwards post beautiful photographs of the remains of said lunches: crumbs on white linen; an abandoned fork; the empty shell of an oyster enjoyed.

I am, of course, jealous of these people, and I write that with the full knowledge that it’s a ridiculous response. But it’s also the one that comes naturally. It’s the photographs that get me. A record of someone else’s supposed reality, they fill me with yearning for my own fiction, for a life where the refrigerator is full and cheerful, and I can pay the minimum due on my credit cards; where I regularly wash my hair, and don’t eat soup from a can, and never succumb to the compulsion to nap for hours when it’s light outside. Where no one in my family is ever ill, or broke, or depressed-- where we are, in short, none of us, human-- and I am inspired to document all that quiet content with my camera.

I don’t take pictures at all, really, and there are a couple of reasons for that. For one thing, I don’t like the distraction of the camera, which always obstructs my direct experience of the moment. But more importantly, the pictures I take are, for the most part, a failure. Photography, along with cartwheels and diving, seems to be one of those things at which I am not very good. Friends who have extensively studied photography, and who, it is generally thought, take excellent photographs, assure me that this cannot be true. Anyone, they say, can take a good picture. It is a skill that can be learned.

Perhaps.

But I maintain that, as my own worst enemy, I’m in the way even when I’m behind the camera. I think too much, and as a result, my photos always disappoint me. They always seem, to me, to have missed the mark, to have been taken just a moment too soon or just a bit too late, and when I look at them I fail to find the thing I was trying to capture.

I am reminded of a quote by Foucault, around which I based a term project for a Liberal Studies class during my final year of college— "Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?"— when I think of all the modern means of display— the breakfast blogs and status updates— which allow us to create a virtual reality in which we posit ourselves as we would like to be seen, and which, in turn, leave us longing for the things we are not, even as we inspire that longing in others. All art is a narrative, after all, and all narrative is a fiction of sorts. The picture of the peach, all rosy and plump, is not the peach itself. But it makes me hungry, just the same.