Nothing to See Here

An accidental craft talk

After several months, I picked up my camera and took it with me. It was the first seventy-something day of the year and we’d rallied some friends for a picnic. Spending a little film “made sense.” But like uncapping a pen and feeling it glide across notebook paper, I’d forgotten its pleasures — advancing the film with your thumb, the lens resisting as you focus, the mechanical clack of the shutter.

In Europe, the camera and I were inseparable. I’d bought this Olympus OM-1D, a compact, fifty-year old tank of an SLR, only two weeks before we sold our house and got on a plane. It seemed “for” beautiful places. Desired places. Setting aside all theories on cameras as the American’s “job” while on vacation¹, the idea of spending film abroad is a frictionless one: There are “things to see” in France and Italy and Portugal.

With 35mm, pictures cost money — around 94¢ per frame. In so-called flyover country, there is no ROI — no reason, the math argues, to carry around such a tactile object. This is what I’d felt since returning home in October², and I went about my days, for a variety of reasons, in deep resentment of elsewheres.

Save for a long essay about the increasingly deadly domestic front in America’s “war on terror,” I haven’t had much to say in 2026. Nothing feels “worth it,” in our haggler’s idiom. The truth is that I’ve had to reinvent my life (again). In January, we finally found an apartment and took our stuff out of storage. I’ve since cobbled together a freelance and consulting income that hoovers up as much as sixty hours a week. My living space is brand new, bone white, underfurnished, a little sterile; and I don’t know if I mind — at least not yet. Seven months ago, I was tan and thin and very lonely, writing essays in a laughably unaffordable apartment in the bougiest part of Lisbon. Today, for the first time in two decades, I live in the suburbs. I’m someone who drives twenty-nine miles to an office, who eats too much Chinese food, who listens to podcasts³, who lifts weights once or twice a week, who cooks dinner for friends, and who reads for about three and a half minutes every evening before falling asleep. The situation is both blissful and dire; it feels like living in cellophane, shimmer and all.

To try to recalibrate, I reached for a favorite novel. In Light Years, Salter damns a minor character with ruthless efficiency: “His eyes were spent, they had nothing in them.” Later, after the couple at the center of the novel has divorced, Viri moves to Rome and meets another woman. What starts as romance — an architect, after all, here to devour the Eternal City, falling in love anew — soon “hardens to intractable life.” Living in Rome, Viri realizes, is not like living alongside the Hudson: “He stood beside [Lia] as she turned the key two, three, four times, driving the bolt ever deeper. There was also a key for downstairs, and two for the car. He remembered how once they had never locked anything except when they went to the city. He remembered the river, the dry lawns of autumn warmed by the sun.”

Among all the beauty in Italy, Viri too risks spending his eyes, depleting their capacity. Like the famous monuments that show up in tourist photographs, the idea of Rome occludes Viri’s view of it. He wants to see it, but can’t, which recalls or rhymes with something Lia tells him — in one of my favorite passages from the novel — about happiness:

But happiness is not so easy to find, is it? It’s very difficult to find. It’s like money. It comes only once. If you are lucky, it comes once, and the worst part is there’s nothing you can do. You can hope, you can search, anger, prayers. Nothing. How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion. Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready.

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One sunny, listless afternoon, my husband turned to look at me. His eye, normally what people call “liquid brown,” met the light and wagon-wheeled with color: splinters of mahogany, tatters of aspen leaf, emerald shards, sandstone flecks, the sullied marble of petrified wood. It was over in a second, of course — it’s too painful for anyone to be lit up so nakedly — but I couldn’t forget it. Later, I recalled Hervé Guibert’s intimation of what a photograph is: “an event of light.” The eye was waiting for me to see it, which gave me a strange, triangulating thought: I am justified in noticing this.

Part of what makes photography a surrealist enterprise is its democratization; there’s nothing elitist or aristocratic in a camera’s attention. In Image Control, I wrote about this in relation to Francesca Woodman’s photographs, in which objects,

human and not, get spilled on by light; a rectangle from a window stretches across the floor, bisecting warped and wrinkled leaves of wallpaper that have curled onto the floorboards. A little pane of glass intensifies the light upon Woodman’s fingers, visually slicing them at the knuckle. These objects, bodies included, remind us just how dramatically light can change a thing, how it bestows another side, another use, even another meaning. All objects are treated the same, given the same importance; all are worthy of, or deprived of, the gift of light.

If anything, objects of great, undisputed beauty — cathedrals and paintings, the art nouveau Metropolitain signs in Paris, crates of produce in French markets, the Palace at Sintra, St. Mark’s — can easily occlude or disrupt the event of light; instead of objects, they become subjects. They reframe the photograph as a document or as evidence, which is largely the imperialist project of Instagram: I was here, I saw this, I took this, it’s mine.

an event of light in Paris + an event of light in Sintra

Let me tell you a secret about the most beautiful city in the world. Paris is wet. Even in summer it rains often, and the cobblestone streets and sidewalks funnel it, channel it, entrap it; it sits cupped there, handful after handful held out to you on every block. The Haussmann buildings sit shrunken in it, creased and off kilter. Light trembles at each diagonal corner; at night, the Place Pigalle is a black pool of incandescent eels. I have a hard time believing that Impressionism would have happened without all this water, not to mention the city’s long lineage of street photography. Puddles literally invite reflection, and in thousands of paintings and photographs we see Paris looking at itself, thinking about itself. It’s an intimate way of looking at a city, as if on every corner we catch it in this moment of self regard, and that is what makes Paris’s beauty feel so personal — as opposed to monumental. Like Salter’s girls at communion, its face is forever upturned, ready for light.

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Since returning to the Midwest, I’ve had difficulty justifying anything I do — a utilitarian attitude it’s hard not to have when everything’s so sensible, so pragmatic, so minimal. Why take notes for another book? Why haul the paints and brushes out of storage? Why bring the camera to dinner? These things cost in ways I can’t account for. I’d internalized a lot of what people say about the Midwest: that it’s ugly, that it’s flat, that it’s boring, that nothing happens here, that it’s uncultured, that it’s utilitarian. And while all these things are true, they are not complete.

an event of light in a suburban back yard

In February, I spent some time thinking about the next state over, at least as rendered in Glenway Wescott’s marvelous, unique, textured fiction. In October, Belt Publishing is reissuing Wescott’s 1927 collection of stories, Goodbye, Wisconsin (which you can preorder, and which will include my introductory essay — thank you to Anne Trubek for the opportunity!). Wescott too fell in love with French food and French culture and French morals, but he also knew the Midwest’s beauty — a beauty that isn’t so much unsolicited but unsoliciting: “green, sumptuous, tedious, both rich and poor at once, with little sad houses and no night-life. What was odious in it was identical with what was dear.” The landscape here doesn’t want you to know it’s beautiful; you have to catch it in moments of surprise, which is perhaps an appropriately Protestant antipode to Paris, staring in its million little mirrors.

Wescott’s delicate brush reminded me of another Midwestern writer’s fastidious attention to detail, humming in this glimpse of a field alongside a highway in an industrial office park, that stereotypically hideous anywhere:

An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadows. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you.⁴

There’s something autonomous in this: not caring if anyone can see you, letting the light fall where it falls. It doesn’t ask for justification because it knows it’ll never get it. As with Gerald Murnane’s grasslands, there will never be a craze or a trend for selfie backdrops like these, for images of furrowed fields and aluminum pole barns and old willows brushing their fingers in a creek gone foamy with runoff.

And this disregard is why you take the camera.

Like a storm sweeping in, you never know, here in the Midwest, when you’ll witness an event of light. This is not frivolous. Instead, it’s the most elemental preparation a photographer or a painter or a poet or a writer can make. The only justification is that you want to be ready to see. You want to train yourself to be ready to see. This is the eye people talk about when they say one “has an eye” — wandering, capacious, patient, ravenous; all when everyone says there’s nothing to see.

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Thank you for reading. I know it’s been a while, but with this new stability I’m finally approaching something like a rhythm and a schedule. As always, please don’t hesitate to check out my books, if you feel so inclined, or support my work with a paid subscription. But really I’m just grateful to have you here.

1. Here’s Sontag, from On Photography: “Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.”

2. Despite evidence to the contrary in my phone’s camera roll: paths in an autumn forest; an eerie viridian fog wrapping its fingers around a water tower; the northern lights; my nephews cuddled on a couch, faces fixed on the TV you can see reflected in the window behind them as they watch Dorothy sing “Over the Rainbow” for the first time in their lives; many variations of snow-dust, snowbanks, snowfall, snowmelt, snowmen, snow forts, snowsuits, snow shovels, snowballs, and snow; Christmas trees; Christmas presents; Christmas mornings; cats’ eyes; a dog’s eyebrows; and an overwhelming quantity of Legos.

3. The New York Review of Books’ Private Life is my favorite, but I’ve also enjoyed Jessa Crispin’s Culture We Deserve and David Sessions’ brand new Off Christopher Street.

4. The Pale King, David Foster Wallace.