The Mug Got Its Picture Taken

February thirteenth. There is a version of this I did not write, the one where I explain, carefully, all the reasons the camera stayed in the bag. I have been drafting it since October, more or less. Three walks with the camera in the bag. The maker's market with the camera in the bag. A Tuesday session in January where Simone asked, offhand, whether I had been shooting anything, and I said something vague about the light being wrong, which was not entirely false and was not the real answer.

The real answer is that I did not know what I wanted the camera to see. That is a stranger thing to sit with than it sounds. I have known for a while now that I use it as a looking tool rather than a recording tool, that came out of the food photography class, the urban geometry work, all of it. But knowing that is different from knowing what to point it at. For six months I kept picking it up and then not lifting it to my eye, which is its own kind of answer but not a satisfying one.

This morning I made coffee, set the mug on the windowsill the way I always do when the counter is crowded, and then stood there looking at it for a moment too long. The mug is not beautiful. It is not even particularly interesting. It is just the mug I use, the one I have used for years, sitting in front of the letterpress card and the two photographs and the cord and Carol's small object, all the things that have accumulated there without ceremony, in the gray February light. And I picked up the camera.

six months of carrying it around. this is what finally came out.

I took three frames. I do not know yet which one is right, I suspect I already know and am just taking the lag time before admitting it. But the thing I noticed, standing there after, was that the reason I could finally take it was exactly because the mug does not matter. It is not a subject I have been waiting to be ready for. It is just a thing that was there. Maybe that was the only way back in, not through something worthy of the camera, but through something so ordinary that there was nothing at stake in looking at it wrong.