Camera Head

One quick snap. One moment. Flash, bang, and the picture’s captured.

I live with the camera. Not to say that I constantly carry it around, no. I had my head surgically replaced with a head shaped camera.

It seems a lot stranger than it actually is.

I guess I should explain why I decided to have this sort of plastic surgery, though that in and of itself kinda gets to the reason why. As with most people that decide to get cosmetic, elective surgery, I wanted something different than what my parent’s genetics provided. 

I received my first camera when I was four. My parents gave me one of those Kodak Brownie cameras from the fifties that I’m pretty sure their parents gave to them when they were the same age. I’m not entirely certain why they gave me their old hand-me-down camera, since it wasn’t like they couldn’t afford to buy a new one from this century. I suppose it might have been a sentimental sort of thing. My mom raised my brother and I with sepia nostalgic lenses, never forgetting to make every teachable moment a reminder of what it used to be like back in the ole days.

While the Brownie worked surprisingly well for a good many years, it did eventually break after one too many times of wearing it around my neck whenever I slept. It went through an incredible amount of strain, especially whenever I went camping and insisted on falling asleep on the ground of the tent after countless hours of fishing in fish derelict ponds. 

Most of my early work was amateurish, to say the least. I don’t think I could point to a single photo I took before I was eighteen and say that I was all that proud of it now that I’ve grown. Especially now that I’ve transformed myself into a camera. But if there’s one thing you could say about my early work, I was prolifically bad in my pursuit, downright stubborn in taking at least twenty photos each day.

After college, I meandered from one job to the next, trying to find my artistic footing and my photographic voice within an overly saturated industry pushing constantly in the direction of more commercialization, more photoshopitization, more hours spent on Instagram rather than serious art magazines.

It was insulting to see what was happening to my chosen profession. I was trained to become a classical photographer, like Man Ray or Dora Maar (and I didn’t just mention those two because they were the first photographers that popped up when I Googled famous photographers). I was never equipped to deal with the compulsive changes in social media that occurred every third Thursday by some unordained counsel of malaise preteens sorting through their hats as fast as their hearts changed and would flash their cameras on their hi-tech, hi-concept phones at any Gram-worthy piece of food or injustice without any trace of irony.

My art centered around clutter. Everyday, mundane pieces of flotsam drifting in and out of suburban wilderness and factories and office parks and shopping strips and anywhere else h.sapiens happened to leave unwanted and wonted things. I was making a statement, or so I like to tell myself. About consumerism. About environmentalism. About everything. Or about nothing. I’m not quite so certain myself.

I got bored. Ennui in photography hits like a heroin high withdrawing from the galaxy of miasmic alchemy stringing thoughts of hope along an endless, drifting cloud double parked in an unforgiving, tow-zone borealis.

By twenty-five, I felt burnt out. Snapping pictures for school kids for yearbooks and the occasional wedding thrown my way by my old college roommate that specialized in special-sappy moments photography. I not only wanted to quit photography, I wanted to quit everything. I went through several drafts of a suicide note to leave to no one in particular, because I hadn’t maintained a decent relationship, a decent friendship, a decent family connection, in so long I could barely consider myself a social animal. Perhaps the anti-social animal mothers tell their toddlers not to feed less they get their fingers bitten off.

Then I saw the flier. Dr. Bernstein. Something of a witch doctor practicing western medicine and attempting to get their board-certified medical license in the state of New Hampshire put up an online ad for volunteers to participate in elective, cosmetic, highly experimental surgery to replace clients’ heads with everyday objects. Serendipitous doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling.

I didn’t know what exactly to expect when I went into the consultation of Dr. Bernstein. Maybe something of a Vladimir Demikhov. Maybe they’d ignore my suggestion and just stitch someone else’s head onto my body and I’d be the guy with two heads that lived for fifteen some odd minutes and got written up in some weird tabloid medical journal for people to gawk at.

“I want a camera head. I’m tired of seeing the world through the perspective of my eyes. They do a horrible job at capturing things. I want to be able to constantly capture any given moment with the blink of my camera, which could only be doable if my actual head was a camera.”

“I can do it,” Dr. Bernstein assured.

He drew up a schematic of what the camera would look like, how he would connect it to all the nerves running through my body, and how I’d still be able to function normally but with a camera as a head rather than my birth head. It took his team over a month to manufacture the camera that would replace my head.

The surgery took a little over twenty-six hours. The nurses told me they lost track of how many times I had died on the table. 

“It’ll take some getting used to,” he said after the surgery. “Don’t worry if it doesn’t feel right at first. What we did was abnormal. You went from having a human head yesterday to now having a camera as a head. But be patient. Give yourself some slack. No one tells an infant to get used to their head the moment they pop out of the womb. So don’t sweat if it seems awkward at first.”

Whenever I blinked, I took another picture. I couldn’t help but take several thousand pictures over the course of the next fifteen hours after the surgery. 

I did feel a bit sore, but I assumed that was because of the surgery. My senses felt out of whack. I couldn’t focus. I had no memory. I kept zooming into details I didn’t mean to, and blurring out details that I wanted to hone in on. I felt like my photography was a mess. Probably because it was a mess.

But with enough practice, I did in fact get used to taking pictures in my new form. I became downright prolifically good, if I do say so myself. The photos I took had a central focus, usually whatever I was looking at. They also seemed a bit more prescient. I don’t know. It’s as if the pictures I took seemed to capture what was going to happen rather than what was happening. I suppose that was a result of being able to take a picture in the literal blink of an eye.

My first gallery showing post-camera-head-surgery occurred almost a year later. Much of the work displayed lacked a central theme. But I don’t think the organizers really cared. They were just amazed that a human body had a camera for a head. It was kitschy. 

No one seemed to care what I had to say with my photography. They ignored my commitment to my craft. I fell into a depression. Isolated myself even further than I had already. 

I considered cutting my throat in front of the gallery for the audience of lookie-loos trapezing through my photography, making damn sure they didn’t look down less they develop vertigo and fall.

But Dr. Bernstein never said I wouldn’t be able to find my throat.

I joined a freak show carnival and fit right in. No one seemed to mind that I was taking pictures of them constantly. In a way, they embraced it, like I was one of them because I was one of them. I was, am, and will forever be a freak. My gallery shows were openly displayed in each town we went to as a troupe. I developed a following. I think someone told me someone in Hollywood was developing a movie or docuseries about me on Netflix. I never saw anything.

Though I don’t regret it. I don’t think of my life as some silly parable parents tell their kids to try and stifle their creative passion so that they pursue something more grounded, like a business degree or a salaried position in middle management. Especially since that interpretation is flawed. 

I'm one of a kind. But I might need to start taking more melatonin to get to sleep.