de Botton writes that "a dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this, and it mattered to me'". To explain this more fully, he focuses on the philosophy of John Ruskin.
Ruskin believed that "there was only one way to possess beauty properly, and that was by understanding it, by making oneself conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) responsible for it. The most effective means of pursuing this conscious understanding was attempting to describe beautiful places through art, by writing about or drawing them, irrespective of whether one happened to have any talent for doing so."
de Botton explains, "If drawing had value even when practiced by those with no talent, it was, Ruskin believed, because it could teach us to see - that is, to notice rather than merely look. In the process of re-creating with our own hands what lies before our eyes, we seem naturally to evolve from observing beauty in a loose way to possessing a deep understanding of its constituent parts and hence more secure memories of it."
Can you imagine lingering in a place for 20 minutes to draw a scene that has captivated your attention, rather than pausing for 5 seconds behind your camera and moving on? What about coming home from a trip with a book of sketches, rather than a disk of images? Which one is more inclined to help us truly possess that which we experience when we travel? Ruskin too "began to note the devilish problem that photography created for the majority of its practitioners. Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it."
I gave up photography for over a decade, returning to it half-heartedly only three years ago, for similar reasons. I found that with my camera in hand, I became preoccupied with the question, "does this make a good picture?" rather than, "how does this place, this scene, this moment, impact me?" Even though I am happy to have our new camera, I still fear that photography is giving me a false sense of permanence, an excuse for not living in the present moment: "With this photo, I can always come back and re-live this again some day." Not true.
Besides, can you imagine trying to draw the Bavarian chaos above? Okay, bad example...
