What I Was Actually Photographing

October twenty-ninth. The class was two hours, a Tuesday, a room I've been in before for other things, the community center classroom with the folding tables and the clamped daylight bulbs someone brought in to make the overhead light workable. There were maybe eight of us. An instructor who knew what she was doing and a portable induction burner and a lot of chopped things in small bowls. The assignment was: photograph the dish as it comes together. Simple.

I didn't photograph the dish. I mean, I did, technically. I have frames of a finished bowl of something that looked appropriately autumnal. But the frame I kept, the one I came home and looked at for a long time, is from before. It's the bowl with the onions and the thyme sprig and a shadow that the thyme threw across the inside of the ceramic. The dish wasn't finished. The instructor hadn't said go yet. I had shifted two steps left of where I was standing because the light from the left-side clamp was catching the bowl's rim in a way that didn't exist from the right angle, and I took the picture before I'd decided to.

Simone making a point about what I actually photographed vs. what I was supposed to photograph.

Simone was there, and at some point she stopped what she was doing and looked across the table at me and said something like: you keep photographing the thing before the thing. She wasn't wrong. I've been thinking about it since I got home, not anxiously, just turning it over. The food photography workshop I registered for was nominally about food. And what I apparently brought to it was the same thing I brought to a sidewalk block in late afternoon light in 2014, which is: I'm looking for the moment just before the subject becomes what it's supposed to be. The edge. The shadow. The composition that exists for about four seconds before someone moves the bowl.

The frame I kept. Not the dish. The moment before the dish.

I don't know what to do with that exactly. I'm not sure I have to do anything with it. It's one Tuesday's worth of evidence. But it's the clearest thing the camera has said to me in a while, and I've learned to write that kind of thing down before the lag gets too long.