Photographs (or, Snapshots)

Photography is becoming and increasingly present element of my life in Austria. Sometimes I shift through an album or a few pages on the facebook, or I'll browse a week of college on my macbook. Then again, there are ever more photos to be added to my computer, as a rare opportunity would be missed if I were to neglect my camera for these next four months. Photos, then, are a product and also a constant task, and moreover one on which I should begin to focus a bit more ardently. A more professional manifestation of this theme is the work with which my colleague Daniel and I are presently preoccupied: the Winter Festival photo board, which displays small headshots and dense biographies of all of the participants for our weeklong program. Daniel has worked exquisitely hard on the festival as a whole, and has been a brilliant role model in terms of work ethic and drive in order to complete the tasks which are assigned to the office. 

This photo board, it seems to me, is a bit of a microcosm of my struggle between my present opportunity and desire to travel versus my desire to have a swarm of kids and a goodly wife. The people on this board are all past attendants of some session that has been hosted by SGS: this is a prerequisite for invitation. And most of them are families. The union of these two qualities is something that I hope to foster in my own future, also in general I perceive that constant travel and a maintenance of a cogent family life is a stellar challenge. So I shall learn from the masters, then. Let us see if I can sit here in front of the photo board and discern that which is common, and then I will decide to what extent these incarnations are tolerable.

Actually, a lot of the guys seem to share something in common. I have never met any of them, and I have only read a very few things about them, so my conception cannot be totally correct: this is more playful than anything. But, into the fray. First, in every one of their pictures, they wear a variation of virtually the same exact thing: collared shirt, layering piece, chinos, and a belt. Everyone combs his hair to the side, categorically shaped in that sort of smooth, airy, Yale debate team-style flop-over. But there must be a couple other mitigating factors that have nothing to do with clothing, because otherwise every person who attends a Thanksgiving dinner would be a Salzburg Fellow. And it seems as if a very large percentage of the people who send in group pictures have a field by their house, or at the very least have densely-leaved trees in their yards; every picture with a group, save one, shows the family crouching in a veritable thicket with a novelty-size leaf pile. Alternatively, they all read the same photography tips magazine, and not one of them has a lick of sovereign creativity. Each of them perhaps comes from money, or at least garners a great deal of it now.  But after simply reading their biographies, which are scribed by the individuals themselves originally, it is plain to notice a sort of affect that indicates propriety: it is refined in a way that is not express education, and it is sometimes haughty in a way that shows unnoticed and enduring pride. And finally, yet most adversely, no one mentions affection for any sports teams. Where is the appreciation for things that they cannot control? Where is the devotion to something that break your heart, mends it together again? Where is the adherence to a code that unites people of like mind all over the nation and world, and which governs a relationship that fosters pride, and joy, and misery, and heights-then-depths that are lasting and wonderful and bitter and new every brilliant season?

Well then, no, I should not like a life like this. Give me the shirts and the leaves, in the end, and keep the rest. And so onwards, men of like mind: to change the world again, the way we would have it.