The Beauty in Here and out There
- Kris J. Simpson
- Apr 20
- 8 min read
Why Narcissus Needed a Camera Instead of a Mirror
The decision came down from the school principal, and although I had seen it coming since I had become such a liability, I was still disappointed. The rest of my grade 8 classmates would be off to the Zoo for the last school trip of the year, but I would be forced to stay behind because of past, undeniable bad behaviour.
My conduct during a school trip to Ottawa earlier that year turned what was intended to be a wholesome youth experience into a debacle. I faced multiple charges, including smuggling alcohol into our hotel and possessing adult-only reading material, which, not so ironically, mainly contained non-wholesome pictures.
I was convicted on all counts and suspended from school for a week. The suspension was uneventful, as I preferred creating trouble with others rather than alone. There were many other minor infractions that I won’t mention here, since I would like to maintain a relatively good image, just in case my kids eventually read this article.
Just days before the trip was planned, I was approached by one of the Grade 7 teachers, someone who had never taught me but must have known enough about me and my reputation. I was surprised when she proposed an alternative plan for the school trip that would allow me to attend, but with stipulations.
She was a photographer who planned to take pictures that day but needed an assistant. She would be my chaperone and teach me how to take photos. This didn’t interest me in the least, but I dreaded being alone in the principal’s office while my classmates had a get-out-of-school-for-a-day pass, so I acquiesced to the deal.
I will never forget the day I looked into the eyepiece of the first professional camera I had ever laid my hands on. Even as a young boy, I knew I was seeing the world from a different perspective, and it was fascinating. The animals I captured on film that day were equally captivating, since I had already developed a love for pets, not limited to dogs, rabbits, and fish, but also for some non-conventional pets, such as insects and amphibians. Essentially, anything I could build a home for and care for. But the Zoo was a different place, where the exotics and giants of the animal kingdom, such as lions, monkeys, and rhinoceroses, lived.
I was a different boy that day, not one the teachers had come to expect, and I even gained my chaperone’s trust, who even let me venture off to snap photos. Oblivious to the time, I was left in a state of angst when it was time to leave. But the experience continued, since she thought the pictures were so good that we should present them to the entire school in a slideshow. Way back then, we used to have something called a carousel slide projector. After we developed the pictures, they were prepared as small slides that would be put into the carousel device, which would project them onto a screen, much like what you would experience in a movie theatre, except these were still photos.
I was asked to choreograph the slideshow to music, so I picked a popular song at the time by a Scottish-born Canadian musician named Gowan, “You’re a Strange Animal.” I rehearsed the show for a week, getting the timing down and hitting the slides to the melody. My heart was in my throat when the lights in our gymnasium were turned off, all the students staring at the white drop-down screen, awaiting the show. I embarrassingly admit that I still get emotional thinking about the students’ reactions to the photos I took that day, stimulated by the loud music and the creative pictures. It left me wanting more.
Unfortunately, the exhilaration I felt from photography was short-lived. I never held a professional camera again until my 40s, when I wanted to take pictures of animals again, this time Bengal leopard cats, which I had started breeding as a hobby. I went to YouTube, where I learned to DIY just about anything, and before too long,
I had a good understanding of photography, all self-taught, learning as I went until I considered myself good enough to be called a recreational photographer. I had become obsessed again, exploring places, many times alone, to take pictures of anything that moved, including athletes of all kinds, skateboarders, kite surfers, and, of course, more and more animals.
I always feel serendipitous when experiences from our youth that you may have forgotten resurface in adulthood. As children, we seem to already know, without knowing, what drives us towards purpose.
I often ask myself where the motivation to take photos comes from, not just for me but for many others who are drawn to the art of photography and videography. My explanations often centre on the feeling I get when taking photos.
Paradoxically, it is both calming and exhilarating. There is a sense of presentness about it, along with a sense of urgency that is forced upon you if you want to get the perfect shot, which tends to be 1 out of every 100 photos. If we’re talking about a photo that I would deem worthy of blowing up and framing, it’s closer to 1/1000. And that shot will vanish in an instant, as all things do.
Because it requires your undivided attention, the default mode network areas of my brain, which are the source of self-talk, usually the critical type, along with rumination on all that has already been done and what needs to be done, go silent. There is a myopic focus on the subject of the photo, along with an implicit focus on the periphery, bringing the entire vision together within the frame. It calls upon your right and left brain hemispheres to work together, creating a balanced feeling, assuming you’re not too busy tinkering with the technical stuff.
Photography doesn’t serve any of my extrinsic goals, since I haven’t made any money from it, or earned any status, and that might only take away from my selfish venture. Rather, it’s all about me, fulfilling my intrinsic needs, yet it isn’t about me, since my photos are never selfies. It’s what I used to call F.U.N. (Frequent, Unnecessary, [but] Nurturing) when I was life coaching, after realizing that my clients were limiting the amount of “fun” they could have in their lives.
Photography puts you in a mind space where you’re searching for beauty, seeing the world through the viewfinder, constrained by the borders of the frame, focused on a single moment in time, the world takes on a different perspective. It’s like looking through a child’s eyes, seeing something for the first time — but in this case, you’re seeing it differently for the first time. It’s summed up with the famous idiom, “stop and smell the roses.”
Witnessing beauty puts you in a state of awe; it’s something beyond language and can take the form of music, art, dance, or even nature. In fact, I would argue that we could not create anything more beautiful than what nature has created without our intervention.
Beauty is admirable when experienced, whether through sound, visuals, or both, or, if you’re like me, in what I see, smell, touch, hear, and feel, both physically and intuitively, in nature. The feeling that arises is awe, which I always find brings pause and gives way to gratitude, the most powerful antidote to self-centred mental afflictions, such as anxiety and its close opposite, depression.
And the “fun” doesn’t stop there. I rush back to my computer to view my treasures on a big screen and then augment the pictures, putting my own artistic fingerprint on them. Unlike treasures typically hunted down to be possessed, I am compelled to share the beauty I have found so my family, friends, and the small group of followers I have on Instagram can also see what I have seen. If you would like to see some of my photos, here is the link.
If one didn’t know, one might think that almost everyone is a photographer today, and would be experiencing the same awe and gratitude that I do, since almost everybody has a handheld camera in the form of a phone. But what is also common in today’s age is social media, designed to capture the Ego, or the “I” in identity, in the form of pictures that glorify our personal beauty, possessions or prizes, rather than the beauty outside of ourselves.
Algorithms reward those who take selfies or self-interested photos, since those posts are fed to followers, and each like and comment validates the person, who, in most cases, is unconsciously seeking validation. Confirming someone else also gives you permission to post your own selfie or other self-interested photo, since likes are typically reciprocated, which powers the ever-growing social machines.
Photography has now become a way not to capture beauty, but to attract the attention of the people you seek.
How do I know this? Because I have been tempted and [willingly] held hostage from time to time ever since “Myspace,” the first global social media site, became a thing. It is powerful, and even those who think they can avoid being trapped by it, through the echo chamber they create, start believing in their self-importance. I would bet that even the strongest of characters will be caught in its web.
I have been aware of this strange aspect of social media for a very long time, and even so, I have engaged with it in this way from time to time. Strange because the endless self-aggrandizing that fills most of the spaces on social media just feels weird. Even when it’s camouflaged as information purporting to be for the benefit of others, there is still a hidden I, Me, and My behind the message, and you don’t normally have to look very hard.
But here’s the thing: it only feels weird when you’re not part of it. When you live in those spaces, self-promoting just feels normal. In fact, if you’re not doing it, you won’t be rewarded. You will be minimized, and your reach will be deliberately throttled, not necessarily by the algorithm, but by us, since the algorithm was built on our desires.
I had a funny experience recently in a hotel washroom when I saw a small mirror on the counter and remembered it was called a “vanity mirror.” No, really, that’s what it’s called. I then had a vision, or perhaps an apparition, of hundreds of people holding their vanity mirrors, trance-like, capturing their reflections. I assumed the implication was that our phones are the modern-day vanity mirrors, a concerning outlook for humanity’s future.
Our phones [or mirrors] separate us from others and our environment, manipulating our brains to focus more and more on ourselves, all in an attempt to create an even better digital avatar, something we can chase but will never come close to the real thing. The paradox is that the more attention we put on ourselves, the more we compare ourselves to others. An unbalanced focus on Self can only lead to over-identification with Self and block out the beauty that surrounds us. More importantly, it will undoubtedly steal the feelings of awe and gratitude we experience when we step beyond Self.
All of this would not be true if you were like the Greek mythical character Narcissus, who, from birth, was always told how handsome he was. Growing up, he became vain and cruel, eventually rejecting the advances of a nymph named Echo, leaving her heartbroken. Nemesis, the Goddess of retribution, cursed him. After seeing his reflection in a pond for the first time, he was awed by his beauty. He became obsessed with his reflection, whispering to it, begging it to love him back, reaching out to kiss it, but every time he did, the image broke apart.
Unable to leave for days, he starved to death. At the place where he died, a beautiful white flower grew, which we know as the “narcissus” or the “daffodil”, with a flower that points downward, forever gazing at its reflection in the water, here to remind us of this cautionary tale:
That beauty can only be truly experienced when it is recognized both internally and externally, in harmony.
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