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3 Minutes and 58 Seconds of Darkness

2019-05-28 · letter vlog · John · 3:58 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Philosophy & meaning (also: Internet & YouTube, Personal life) · mode: Personal essay

John reflects that cameras both record and distort: his camera cannot show the night sky he saw over Indianapolis, yet images feel like proof; citing Susan Sontag, he admits he documents to fix himself in time and warns that seeing through a camera misses everything it doesn't see.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — What the camera saw of last night's sky over Indianapolis versus what John saw

  • ★★ John has been thinking about what cameras see and don't: to his eyes last night's sky over Indianapolis looked bright, but the camera can't see the clouds' crisp edges or Venus. — 00:00:00 · Indianapolis

00:00:22 — John's first video camera in 2007 and how camcorders were overwhelmed by the outside world

  • ★★ John says a camera held still and left to take in light for a long time sees much more than the eye can. — 00:00:22
  • ★★ Before the brothers started making YouTube videos in 2007, John had never owned a video camera and rarely took pictures; he has only about a dozen photos of himself from ages 18 to 27. — 00:00:22 · YouTube
  • ★★ John found 2007 camcorders good at static human-built spaces but overwhelmed by the actual world: a few fluttering leaves turned his camcorder into an impressionist painting. (playful) — 00:00:22

00:01:04 — Images online are a sliver of experience, yet feel like proof; pictures crop reality

  • ★ John says making video means keeping light, background noise and camera steady, but outside nothing is steady. — 00:01:04
  • ★★★ John says cameras are better now, and though we repeat that online images are a tiny sliver of a person's experience, it is harder to notice the gap between what you see and what the camera sees. — 00:01:04
  • ★★ John recalls photographing himself and Sarah in the 'vast and empty' Utah salt flats, angling the camera to leave out the many other people photographing themselves there. (playful) — 00:01:04 · Sarah Urist Green

  • ★★★ Though John knows people film only the moments they want seen and that pictures crop rather than capture reality, he can't help feeling images are really real, that they are proof. — 00:01:42

    “pictures don't capture reality so much as crop it”

  • ★★ John says images are necessarily distortions: this footage isn't the sky he saw, yet it is the only record he has of that sky. — 00:01:42

00:02:12 — Sontag on photography, documenting to fix oneself in time, and seeing tonight's sky

  • ★★ John cites Susan Sontag's essay on photography, written long before Instagram or Snapchat, on the camera's twin capacities to subjectivize reality and to objectify it. — 00:02:12 · Instagram
  • ★★★ John asks how we can see an image as both real and distorted, and stay aware that however much a camera captures, of the sky, Instagram feeds or vlogs, it fails to capture almost everything. — 00:02:12 · Instagram
  • ★★ John says he knows this intellectually, but in practice he is overwhelmed by the power of images: his mind can't help but believe what the camera sees. — 00:02:40
  • ★★ John quotes Sontag that needing reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. — 00:02:52
  • ★★★ John sometimes feels something isn't really real unless he has documented it, as if his memories and life would slip past like clouds through the sky. — 00:02:52
  • ★★ John says he takes pictures above all to fix himself in time, a way of saying 'I was here', though the pictures won't last either. — 00:03:21
  • ★★★ John says the risk of seeing everything through a camera is missing everything the camera doesn't see. — 00:03:21
  • ★★★ John can't show viewers last night's sky, but they can see tonight's: it won't photograph well, won't last and won't be remembered forever, but it will be beautiful and important. — 00:03:21

In the description and comments

  • ★ The description says the old footage is from January 2007 and from John's July 2007 video about leaving New York City, and the night-sky image is by Uroš Novina in Slovenia. — video description · New York City

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: photography · Susan Sontag

Also: Indianapolis · Instagram · On Photography · Sarah Urist Green · Snapchat · Utah · YouTube

Only in the description or credits: New York City · Slovenia · Uroš Novina

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