Lenses

I photograph the paintings I want to remember. The full piece, the museum label, closeups of the surface. I’m collecting information to pore over later, to remind myself how someone achieved a particular effect.

Detail of La dama del abanico by Carlos Alberto Castellanos

At museums here in South America, I’ve been watching other people take pictures, too. Sometimes we’re photographing the same pieces, sometimes completely different ones. I’ve started wondering what lens they’re looking through. Are they studying technique like me? Sharing proof they were here, that they saw this? Trying not to forget they felt something? Or maybe they don’t know how else to interact with art—these days snapping a picture is a way to preserve something’s essence. A bookmark in a passage. A licked and sealed envelope.

Left: La dama del abanico by Carlos Alberto Castellanos; Right: A woman taking a photo of the painting

I try not to photograph everything that catches my eye. Sometimes I just sit with it, let it be ephemeral. It comes with a sense of unease. What if I forget how wonderful it was?

It's easier with famous pieces, since I know I’ll encounter them again sometime. (This is where I'd include pics of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera paintings had I chosen to photograph them.)

But here's a Kahlo drawing I thought you might like to see. For your particular lens.

Untitled by Frida Kahlo

At the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires, there was a provocative piece—a grid on the floor with a label that read: DO IT YOURSELF: FREEDOM TERRITORY. I almost walked around it like everyone else. Then I considered that passive viewing was a kind of prison. It's the norm to not touch the art—rightfully so. But I could see this was meant to be interacted with. An invitation to defy convention. Stepping inside was a kind of freedom.

So I did. I walked a few grids forward, up a few, over a few. Hopped to one. I was aware the whole time that the docent and other patrons could see me choose to engage while everyone else skirted around it. An outsider inside the art. A little self-conscious, I suppose, but at least I was free.

Then I stepped out and took a picture. So I’ll remember being free.

Do it yourself: Freedom Territory by Antonio Dias

Speaking of touching the art, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam a few years ago, I watched a family—a mother and two teenage daughters—taking selfies with the art. We'll, not with the art, but in front of it. Glamour shots of themselves posing with a crown of flowers exquisitely rendered in oil by some Dutch master. Priceless art reduced to little more than wallpaper. In an attempt to get the perfect shot, one of the teens backed into a canvas, hitting it with her (unchecked) backpack. I was horrified. They heard me gasp. They looked chagrined but it didn't stop them taking more shots for the ‘gram.

Detail of Garland of Flowers by Jan Philip van Thielen

This morning at breakfast I spoke with a man who said he won't be going to any art museums in Buenos Aires because he doesn’t like art. That’s a lens too. I wonder if he means he doesn’t like art with a capital A, art that takes context and possibly a bit of pretension to parse. Would he like the art I like? The seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century stuff, the beauty and craftsmanship? Maybe he'd find the portraits stuffy and the pastoral scenes banal. We'll never know. He’ll take his pics at the Railway Museum instead.