’The relation between what we see and what we know,’ John Berger wrote in his seminal Ways of Seeing, ’is never settled.’

Berger’s text on visual culture was published in 1972, in the dying days of the analog world. While being an insightful and prescient book, it could not have foreseen just how large that gap between the known world and the one that appears on our screens has become, not least because the very screens themselves could scarcely have been imaged back then.

In recent years I’ve begun to feel a bit estranged from what I’m seeing, not really knowing its truth. For instance, the sunset photo taken on my iPhone looks better than the actual sunset I witnessed on a beach or mountain top. Various filters and enhancers make it so, without me even asking. Film, on the other hand, long brought with it the blemished and the boring. I should know — I shot a lifetime’s worth of bad photos in the pre-digital age. But I also managed a few good ones, just enough to keep me snapping for many years. Or at least, that is, until the iPhone could do it better than my Nikon digital SLR camera.

That Nikon, bought around 2015 or so, was the endpoint of a certain photographic journey. It started in 1989 with a junior high photography class where we spent a semester learning to compose pictures, develop film, and print images in a darkroom. I fell in love with photography and after months of endless pestering, Santa Claus brought me a basic model Pentax SLR, which I dragged around the world with me for many years, snapping happily but staying firmly amateur. (I do recognise the limits of my abilities.)

However, when I saw the flashy digital SLRs in the early 2000s, I couldn’t resist, talent or not. Recalling it now, it seems a bit mad, a strange trust in the future that was washing up in pieces on our shores but not had fully arrived. I ordered a Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel from an eBay seller in Hong Kong for £400 (it was also the early days of eBay), despite a slight niggling feeling that this could all go wrong. It did not and the camera duly arrived. My first shots felt like magic — there was no having to change rolls of film! I could see the results right there, on a little screen on the back of the camera body. Nor did I pay to have film processed, or wade through terrible shots upon receiving my prints. I could edit as I took pictures. It was nothing short of revelatory.

But it was a short revelation because digital cameras were quickly surpassed by the iPhone, which well outperformed my old Canon and was certainly more convenient to carry around. But I wasn’t quite done and decided to try a Nikon, a D3300. Again, not the most advanced camera — but a solid and fun piece of equipment.

When the pandemic hit in 2020 and there was more time — and an empty London — to explore, I brought out my Nikon as well as my Pentax and another film Canon SLR that my mother had bought for me in a charity shop. By this point, I had also acquired a vintage Japanese Yashica rangefinder, which, at £25, was another eBay bargain.

And then, I got an iPhone 13 Pro in 2021 and I almost never touched any of those cameras again.

I occasionally would try, but the digital camera results were lacklustre and dull compared to the iPhone. Film was better, but there were almost no physical labs for processing, so my rolls had to be sent off and it felt increasingly like a bother.

Or, I was just being lazy. Whatever I was doing, I certainly continued in that vein for a while.

When we left for Korea I got rid of my equipment, either in London or in Seoul, selling off the Nikon and its lenses last year. I had resigned myself, in a way, to the AI-tuned perfect sunsets of my iPhone until I couldn’t stand them any more.

It was time, I decided last year, to return to something. Maybe not film. Maybe not a multi-lens DSLR, but something. I needed to stop being that person who whipped their phone out with everyone else. I know how to take pictures! I know how to use a darkroom! So I settled on a compromise and asked Birthday Claus (ie, my long-suffering husband) for a Fuji x100vi. Me and hundreds of other people — I had to wait six months for its arrival. You’ve had far too much detail already, so I won’t go into the nerdy nuts and bolts of it all, but here are the key points: yes, it is digital and no, it doesn’t have changeable lenses.

The second matters more than the first. Finding and dealing with photo processing feels a little outside my language skills here in Korea and I’m not opposed to digital. I realised that wasn’t the issue. I just needed something that had better specs and results than a phone. And, being able to edit as I go, rather than waiting film from a lab, is fine by me.

The real issue was composition. Holding up a phone is not substitute for an eye-piece and a viewfinder. There is something about the discipline of thinking about how the shot should be framed and the other technical aspects, like lighting and settings. It’s a re-discovered delight to bracket a shot with different aperture f/stops, experimenting with shades of light and dark, or to catch an action shot with a motion blur on it, as a subject runs across my field of vision.

And, to the second point, with this particular camera, there is only one lens, a fixed 23mm lens. That’s it. No zooms, no wide angles. Just one type of lens and my eye. I am the zoom. I have to get close if I want to be close. This means there is plenty of room of experimentation and error. Our phones make us perfect photographers, but who wants to be perfect? How will I possibly progress if I don’t shoot a few duff pictures?

I know this is hardly a ‘back-to-vinyl’ type of story. (Amateur photographer decries her growing dependence on an iPhone and then … buys another digital camera.) It’s not about the machine, it’s about the human behind it. If I want to close that ever-present gap between what I see and I what I know, looking at the world through my little Fuji eyepiece might just be a very good way to start.

[To this end, all the nature photos on the page today were taken on said new camera at Seoraksan National Park, in Korea.]

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What I’m … reading Stoner by John Williams

Often described as the best novel you’ve never read, it very well may be. It’s a novel about the almost unbearably petty politics of academic life and a biography of sorts of William Stoner, a fictional English professor at the University of Missouri in the first half of the 20^th century. It was originally published in 1965 but found a new readership and wider sales when it was re-issued in 2005. (Despite the title, there is no marijuana involved, though perhaps there needed to be.) It is a tale that brings to mind Henry David Thoreau’s phrase about most men leading lives of ‘quiet desperation’. Stoner suffers an unhappy marriage and professional setbacks, yet he also, in his own determined way, persists. He finds love, though is forced to relinquish it, and never quits as a teacher until he reaches retirement age. Books and learning bring him great joy throughout. It is the life story of a invented yet believable man. What stops the novel from descending into a melodrama is the exquisite prose of John Williams. Instead, his clear, insightful writing elevates the story of lowly William Stoner into a lesson about love and the purpose of a life.

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