The Camera I Carry – The Images of Eduardo Fujii

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”

— Dorothea Lange

There is {a photograph} I maintain fascinated by. A fellow photographer lies flat towards a rocky shoreline, his physique pressed into the earth, a small movie digicam cradled in each arms and aimed straight on the lens wanting again at him. His face is hidden, swallowed by the digicam, dissolved into the act of wanting. That is Chris. He can also be, in a roundabout way, each photographer I’ve ever admired.

Today is National Camera Day, and I discover myself reflecting on what a digicam truly is. As a posture,  not as a machine. A means of paying consideration.

I’ve moved by a number of of them in my lifetime. Brushes and paint first, then the lengthy, affected person self-discipline of analog movie. Then digital. Now, virtually completely, an iPhone. The arc of that journey used to really feel like a type of loss, every step away from the digicam, the darkroom, the deliberate chemistry of the picture. But I do not see it that means anymore.

In February 2026, I attended a workshop organized by the Monterey Museum of Art the place photographer Sean Mohoot demonstrated the moist plate collodion course of. This 1850s approach produces pictures on metallic utilizing hand-poured chemistry, a large-format digicam, and a endurance that borders on ceremony. Watching him work was humbling. The digicam he used, an enormous picket and brass instrument on a tripod, appeared like one thing dragged out of a daguerreotype. And but the pictures it produced had a presence, a gravity, that no filter or preset has ever replicated. There is a motive photographers nonetheless journey throughout the nation to be taught this course of. There is one thing within the slowness that calls for honesty from each the digicam and its topic.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made the primary everlasting {photograph} in 1826. He needed to wait roughly eight hours for the sunshine to do its work. A century and a half later, in 1975, a younger engineer named Steven Sasson at Kodak invented the primary digital digicam — a 0.01-megapixel system the scale of a toaster that recorded to a cassette tape. Today I carry a telephone in my pocket that shoots in ProRAW, adjusts for depth of subject, and sends pictures to the opposite aspect of the world earlier than I’ve even exhaled.

And but one thing important has not modified: the gesture of elevating a digicam to your eye, or your eye to a digicam, remains to be an act of intention. It says: this second, right here, issues.

 I watched a lady on the pier just lately — hat, tote bag, the fog burning off the bay behind her — maintain her telephone above her head to border the bay, the birds, and the quiet. She was capturing the identical Monterey I shot. A seagull stood sentinel on the railing beside her, detached. She was, in that second, each bit as severe as any photographer I’ve stood beside in a darkroom. The digicam would not decide the seriousness of the seeing.

Jim, one other fellow photographer I’ve identified for years, was out on a foggy seaside a number of years again, bundled towards the wind, tripod legs sunk into the water, digicam raised to his face, searching for the precise second. You may barely see him within the fog. That picture, mushy and chilly and a bit spectral, is considered one of my favorites from that 12 months. Such devotion.

My personal self-portrait, shot in a mirror with my iPhone, captures one thing I’ve been sitting with recently. I’m not hiding behind a cumbersome digicam and lenses anymore. The telephone is held up like a confession. My face is blurred, motion-smeared, the picture scattered with the noise of a moist plate it wasn’t making an attempt to mimic. It appears to be like like what it’s: a person nonetheless determining what he is .

That, I believe, is what images has all the time been. Not a know-how. A query.

Happy National Camera Day. Go make an image, with no matter you have got in your arms.

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Artist Statement

My work lives within the house between reminiscence and remark — pictures that arrive at their that means slowly, the way in which fog does over a bay. I got here to images by portray, and I’ve by no means fairly left that world behind; I’m drawn to mild that feels earned, to topics who appear unaware of being seen, to the visible texture that comes from course of relatively than polish. Whether I’m working with my iPhone or standing beside somebody who pours chemistry onto metallic at midnight, I’m searching for the identical factor: the second when {a photograph} stops being a file and begins being a reckoning.