There is a method to taking photographs where they transcend being reproductions of locations and become their own form of artistic experience.
Looking at a photograph is obviously different than looking at the physical location, in person, that constitutes the photograph. Photographs are limited-- because of this, they invite interpretation. There is a certain sense to which a video of a place is *kinda* like that place-- a photograph is never *kinda like that place*. If it's a photo you took yourself, it might, bitterly, be *lesser-than* that place where you took it. It's lesser in the ways your memories are lesser. Memory, at least for me, is incredibly painful. Memories, to me, are things which are largely destroyed. They're a home country I will never return to. They are an innocence I'll never have. They are people who are dead and laughs I can't laugh again. I have a memory that is at once very bad and way too good. I have at once forgotten almost everything I've ever learned and experienced, and also, I will never be allowed to forget them. I simply can't choose when one or the other occurs.
The recesses of my mind recreate images with a disturbing clarity. When I want to imagine something, I imagine it in 4k Ultra-HD. I can hear music in my head with pretty good (though not perfect) clarity. I can create photorealistic environments in my head and move around them almost like I move my own body. These environments have scents, and sometimes infuriatingly, they employ my taste memory so if I imagine myself eating something I can "taste" it in a way that makes me wish I could eat it for real. When I write a story the characters and situations are so vivid in my stupid brain that sometimes, I *despise* what I have written for falling short of that. But nothing will *ever* have the fidelity that my mind does. If I picked up drawing now, if I tried to create animations, I would be disturbed and angered by them also. My life is frequently about me being disturbed and angered-- if you wonder why my writing is *like that*,
like if you actually think about my writing at all and you're curious--
It's me being disturbed and angry. A lot.
Anyway.
Photographs aren't drawings, or animations-- when you snap a picture of something, it renders it as faithfully as its technology allows.
I'm not a photograph engineer or something-- but to me what defines a photograph is delineation.
A photograph is a slice. There is something implied to exist beyond all of its edges. It is a focus. It is a frame.
I have what I would consider pretty spotty memory recall. If prompted to remember anything, it is very likely I will not be able to remember whatever detail you quizzed me on. If you ask me about a show we watched together, good luck getting anything accurate out of me. However, when I *remember* something, it employs the explosive detail in which things happen in my mind to frequently disturb and anger me-- "in 4k Ultra-HD." This makes me despise my memories even more than a normal person does. Today I was making some egg salad. As I chopped up the hard-boiled eggs, I recalled, with *explosive* clarity, as if I had been plucked from my current location, a moment in 2011 where my father's car wouldn't start after stopping at a red light, and he berated me for not being able to push it while he slammed the accelerator. This moment angered and disturbed me. My recollections of things are disruptive and annoying. If you were to stare at me 24/7 you would notice times where I shut my eyes and grimace for seemingly no reason. In that moment, I have remembered something, unfortunately, and I am expressing my displeasure at this event before moving on with my day.
My dad never believed that this was a real thing that was possible. He said I was making shit up, and being a "hypochondriac."
This too is a thing which my brain frames for me pretty often. I can perfectly recreate in my brain my father's signature, angry yell at me.
You might not believe my mind works as described. Several people who read my works have told me they *can't* imagine *anything* in their minds. They can't make the pictures in their head. They can't vividly see Murati or Shalikova and their world in the way that they exist in mine with such horrific clarity that I can't help but be permanently disappointed with anything I will ever write about them. I never know what to say to them. Sometimes as we are speaking, I am halfway there with them-- and halfway under a very specific tree within walking distance of a place I lived in in Florida, between 2012 and 2015. I recall that specific tree because I have this strange mental mythology, half of which was crafted without my say-so, that I should've walked to that tree more often and sat under it and basked under it and lived my life under it and experienced it more. I went to that tree exactly twice while I lived there. I took a photograph of that tree.
That photograph of that tree is less than that tree. It is lesser than the memory of that tree. I am a bad photographer.
I don't look at that photograph. I remember the tree in my head if I care to remember it at all-- or it comes unbidden while I wish it did not.
Instead of that photograph-- please accept one of the photographs I took in "Lushfoil Photography Sim." A video game you can buy on Steam for 12 dollars.
I think that people widely hold that photographs can have sentimental value, and utilitarian value. Maybe less people than that hold that photographs can have artistic value, that a photograph can be transcendental, that a photograph can constitute a product of creative skill equivalent to drawing, painting, writing, sculpting. That taking a photograph creates an artifact which is different than merely staring at its constituent object. A photograph is an artistic expression-- the photographer has specific skills and techniques, has a mastery over certain tools, and is trying to say something with their work. A photograph can invite interpretation. A photograph of the tree I took is just a photograph of a tree to me-- but it can mean something to *you*, something beyond my intention. Maybe that is your tree. Maybe the strange angle with which I took the picture because I have bad balance, will evoke something.
Lushfoil Photography Sim is a video game where you walk in gorgeous environments and take pictures. Each map rewards the act taking a few *specific* pictures, with unlocking new maps. You collect meaningful pictures, reproductions of reproductions-- and different, site-appropriate collectibles. Having enough of both unlocks new maps. The act of taking photographs is as simulated as I think you could simulate it-- with my laywoman's understanding of photography. There are many camera settings you can fiddle with, different lenses, different shutter timings, etc-- you can even unlock, a whole ass dogshit old camcorder you can record with instead of taking photographs, which turns the game into an "analog-horror lookin' ass" game. (These are my words being quoted-- I am reproducing myself.) The first map, South Tyrol, floored me. It looked gorgeous to me. My friend Esther was watching me stream the game to her as I played. South Tyrol looked gorgeous to her too. She remarked that it resembled an environment she had been in in the USA-- I can't remember which-- and she said it looked "exactly like that." It's Unreal Engine 5-powered beauty felt like it would be a new showcase of my new and muscular gaming PC, which I decided to build now because the economy is falling apart, and I have my priorities straight, clearly. It was, to me, a good showcase.
When I moved in with my girlfriend in 2019, I lived a few firsts in my life. One of them was that I had money and lived in a city. I could "go places." I didn't live in an awful little rural town in Florida where the only thing to see was a tree that I didn't go see-- my girlfriend, now wife, and I, went to museums, and bars, and restaurants. Then Covid hit-- and after that taste of going places, I began to go places in other ways that I now couldn't. I became obsessed with liminal spaces and the backrooms. I got really into gmod and then vrchat exploration with my friend Esther. I have played 350 hours of VRchat. Almost all of them with my friend Esther. We like to explore. While some maps have interactive baubles of various kinds, the main action of exploring these maps, many of which are also beautiful and artistic creations-- is for me to take pictures. Esther takes pictures too-- but mostly, I take pictures of Esther, in these various environments. A lot of the time we use avatars of our favorite characters from gacha games. The other day, we were Stelle and Firefly from Honkai Star Rail, in a map with a big black hole in the background, and I put on Gareth Emery's "Black Hole" in the audio player of the map. I am a very big fan of Stelle and Firefly. So seeing Stelle and Firefly in front of that black hole set to Gareth Emery's "Black Hole" was to me a sort of spontaneous rendition of art. It was a form of self expression. You make your own fun in VRchat when you are not hanging out with 100 children saying racist things they heard on youtube.
You make your own fun when you are not hanging out with real people because you can get a disease that society has allowed to hunt and kill you.
I have a wanderlust for digital spaces. My physical body is trapped in the United States of America for many reasons, monetary, political, practical, filial. I have bought many games in which you wander in a mesmerizing space-- "Trans-Liminal," "Pools," "Dreamcore." I have taken pictures in these games. Steam lets you take a screenshot of your games at any time by hitting F12. It gathers in a neat little gallery for you. In games where I don't have Steam, I sometimes hit F12 to take a picture, which doesn't work, and then I hit printscreen instead. I have taken several gigabytes of screenshots of Genshin Impact, a game that I really like to play. Genshin Impact is about travel, about exploration, about beautiful characters traversing fantastical environments inspired by several real-world nationalities. It has some beautifully stylized environments. I take a lot of pictures of characters standing artlessly in those beautiful environments. My pictures are prosaic. I don't emote the characters often. I rarely am doing some kind of choreographed stunt. Every picture Esther takes of me in VRchat, I'm staring at the middle distance.
Every picture people take of me in real life, I'm probably staring at the middle distance. If it's a particularly unfortunate shutter-moment-- I'm suddenly grimacing.
Nevertheless, I love taking pictures. I love taking pictures because I can always go look at the pictures to remember something is real. Something is real outside of the unbidden recreations of my 4k Ultra-HD brain, and despite the poor recall which my memory otherwise has. In a sense-- clumsy, artless photographer me has more control over those pictures than I have over either the real environments, or the digital environments, or my recall of either real or fictional environments. Those pictures are more real to me than the reality that will exist at any point beyond that moment. That picture was the moment, for me, because what lies beyond those frames, is the curious way in which my brain torments every living moment that I exist.
Lushfoil Photography Sim satisfies all of these drives for me. It presents objectives in order to create a framework for people who need it, but it also encourages exploration. There are perhaps too many unavigable spaces, but this is necessary to preserve the art in a way-- if you could clip through every bush and fence in your way, there would be something about the dignity of the journey you're on that you might be compromising. These are the frames of the picture you're in-- in the same way that the pictures you take are the frame which contains the "action" of the game. I learned not to care about the invisible walls. I learned to explore the world that had been crafted, the picture that the developer took of this real-world location, which I am meant to believe is deeply faithful despite the liberties taken for the sake of smooth gameplay. You can't jump in this game. But you can unlock fast traveling to the moment you took any picture.
The fast travel is really cool-- you suddenly move forward through the frame of your camera lens and are in the spot, your screen now filled with what you were trying to photograph as if you time traveled to just before you snapped the shutter. You earn the fast travel in the Japan map, where you can take a lot cool pictures of Torii gates.
I wanted to talk about the game because it brought me a lot of emotion. I enjoyed and valued it. I don't know much more to say. I'm not a game reviewer.
A photographer might have something more to say about the craft of this game. Whether it is faithful as a simulator. There are so many knobs and buttons you can fiddle with for your camera. I liked taking pictures with the default aperture and so on. My experience of the game is that it satisfies my digital wanderlust. I loved wandering the environments, I loved imagining myself in them, I loved taking pictures, I loved thinking about the developer's decisions, why these places, why these slices of these places, what lies outside the frame of the game itself. It makes me wish that the grim situation of my surroundings could potentially abate so that maybe someday I could visit Le Prarion in France. I could visit it without worrying that I'm a trans woman and that makes me a demonic freak to a lot of the world, and I don't know if this part of the world thinks of me as more or less demonic on this hour or this day; I could visit it without worrying about money; I could visit it without worrying about whether I will be able to exit the country of my residence and whether I will make it back in. I could take very bad pictures around Le Prarion that will last me a lifetime. That will be more pleasant than whatever my brain will conjure of Le Prarion after I'm gone. The camera is my reliable frame; the eyes I was not born with. The memory I cannot have.
Photography fascinates me. We are all snapping pictures; I'm snapping pictures; but there are people who are snapping pictures unlike yours and mine.
For a moment, even taking the same artless pictures I usually take-- Lushfoil Photography Sim made me understand the craft of pictures, the art of pictures, more than I ever had.
And it made me wish to enter its frame, in order to escape mine.
Maybe it should have raytracing to really make my graphics card wish I had never purchased it for five hundred pre-tariff dollars.