Goodbye, Cameras

By Craig Mod

The New Yorker - December 31, 2013

This past October, just before the leaves changed, I went on a six-day hike through the mountains of Wakayama, in central Japan, tracing the path of an ancient imperial pilgrimage called the Kumano Kodo. I took along a powerful camera, believing, as I always have, that it would be an indispensable creative tool. But I returned with the unshakeable feeling that I’m done with cameras, and that most of us are, if we weren’t already.
My passion for cameras began when I was a teen-ager, but I took to them in earnest in 2000, when I arrived in Tokyo as a college student. Back then, the city was rife with used-camera shops overflowing with rows of dusty, greasy, and dented bodies and lenses. I spent several lazy weekday afternoons wandering through the stores, precociously bugging the grouchy owners about the benefits of one camera over another. Deep down, I wanted a classic Leica M3, which cost fifteen hundred dollars at the time, though a choice lens could easily double the price. Constrained by a student’s budget, I chose a used Nikon 8008 body, which the Times had named “the camera of the future” in 1988. I paired it with a cheap 50-mm. lens, then set off for a month hitchhiking the entire breadth of Japan, from Tokyo to Fukuoka, filling my backpack with delicately exposed rolls of film.

To read more...