I want to take less pictures.

I took this while walking around Český Krumlov with friends.: Soon after, I turned off my camera. During my first week here I tried to bring my camera with me everywhere. This desire to record absolutely everything before my eyes became exhausting, not only because of the task and process, but also because I felt as if I was not actually experiencing the things that I had caught on camera.
I was thinking about what de Botton said about looking at a postcard of a place, and comparing it to how I look at my own digital photographs immediately after I take them. The accessibility of boxed images, or our own postcards, is immediate and also unrealistic. We do not see the world in a little frame as our pictures would tell others who look at them.
I decided to cease my compulsive desire of “recording” everything I saw until I felt comfortable in the atmosphere of Prague. There is, of course, something special about photography that is taken fresh and with surprised eyes, but there is something beautiful about a recognition from the point of view of the photographer. I don’t want to get to know Prague through the photographs I take of it. I want to walk through the streets and turn my head without attempting to capture the view for the folks back at home.
I do not want to forget what I see here, but I also do not want to remember it only in rectangular frames. I want to remember the views not because they are easily accessible, btu because they had an impact on my senses.
I’ve found that the sentiment within a rectangular frame is rarely palpable, especially with my own travel photography. As my context changes, my reflections do too. Photographs are not statements of the past, but pieces of them. I do not want postcard-like memorials of the things I’ve seen. Statements can be retracted, denied, or corrected. They are subjective. Those rectangular pieces are objective and two-dimensional. Paul Thompson, professor of Social History at the University of Essex, wrote ihis book The Voice of the Past that
In any context recalling is always an active process. Bartlett wrote, perhaps with exaggeration: ‘in a world of constantly changing environment, literal recall is extraordinarily unimportant. It is with remembering as it is with the stroke in a skilled game. Every time we make it, it has its own characteristics.’ He had in mind particularly how a story may be retold differently to various audiences in different situations, and how its recall can be stimulated by remeeting an old acquaintance, or revisiting the scene of some past event. A willingness to remember is also essential: a feature of memory which is especially relevant to interviewing. (133)

The essence and sensory aspects of the moment itself can never be re-created, only recalled. And I suppose it depends on what I am trying to remember. I can not know now what I will want to remember in the future, so what I will try to do is simply walk around and look with my eyes.