Photographing Stonehenge

I'm thinking about buying a new camera, one of those point-and-shoots, easy to carry, and with creative choices that my iPhone doesn't offer. My old, heavy SLR is a throw-back to an era of burdensome, conspicuous ownership that no longer entices me.

I just returned from a trip to Greece and Turkey without a camera of any kind. I went with the notion that putting a camera between myself and my surroundings would interrupt my experience. I like the naked eye, a preference I first discovered many years ago, after I spent a summer semester in England and had taken a side trip to Stonehenge. Back then I carried another big bulky camera, which hung from my neck like the ancient mariner's albatross.  A telephoto lens counter weighed my backpack. My expensive gear was borrowed, and I bore it with pride.

I took the Stonehenge trip in a heavy rain, hitchhiking with a friend. It stopped before we got to the monoliths, which were made even more picturesque by the mist that surrounded them. As I lumbered with my load through the crowd of tourists, I overheard one say that a week-long pagan ritual had just ended the day before.

There were stanchions that kept the crowds away from the stones. I asked if they had been removed for the ceremonies and was told yes. This piqued my imagination. I thought about the ones in the inner circle who were entrusted with touch and proximity. They were distinct from the rest of us who knew these stones were special only because we had been told. I think now that I used my camera as a shield, its brand (a Nikon, I think) the crest with which I could proclaim not who I was, but who I wanted to be.

I imagined the first group giving back as well as taking from the site. What they gave I wasn't sure. That site of worship had its mysteries and energetic exchanges that I couldn't understand. I belonged to the second group, or maybe that isn't the right word, since we consisted of everyone who didn't belong to the first group. We were less a group than a temporary collection of "others" who had amassed at Stonehenge out of curiosity and cultural longing, with our different beliefs and backgrounds. We would soon disperse and go back where we came from, and that would be that.

Except for our pictures. They were our link. We would all have our pictures when we got home. Along with the others, I held my camera between the stones and myself and clicked away, focusing on light adjustments and shutter speeds, keeping the faith that one or two photos would ultimately please. Someone pointed out that twin rainbows were emerging, which got me to look up. But only for an instant. I didn't want to miss the photo opportunity and quickly knelt on my knees to steady myself as I tried to encompass the stones and the sky with its double rainbow in my limited frame.

Once my roll of film was filled with these rainbow-covered pictures, I felt that my trip was complete. I might not be one of the inner-circle, but I had caught an extraordinary scene. (I didn't stop to think about rainy England with its high rainbow probabilities.) I believed I was moving towards the inside of another group--sophisticated travelers--better than ordinary tourists, although I couldn't have said how.

I'm glad I felt that sense of satisfaction that day because none of those pictures turned out. Back home in the fall, I searched through shot after shot of haze and blackness. Of all of my photographs from that summer, Stonehenge was the only spot that didn't take. Shots of London, the lake district, Westminster, Scotland, Ireland all shined brightly on glossy contact sheets. Only Stonehenge refused to be captured. It was then that I began to think there might be something to the energy in some places in the world. And it was then that I began to distrust photography for its promise of post-gratification.

But that was a long time ago. Now I begin to want the simple fun of cropping a beautiful figure or scene, a garden gate, an open door, a road. So many sensations have passed through me, some remembered, some not. I once again want to relate in another way, giving my love of this life to the things of life itself. Not to try to capture what can never be caught, but to say this is how I saw it that instant and then I moved on.