Verbal Photography

He puts the mug to his mouth and takes a sip of his beer. Placing it back, his lips grow thin in a smile. They sit somewhere there, lost between his outward chin and the long shadow of his nose. His eyes move slowly and indifferently about the room. It is filled with smoke and chatter and quiet static of an overhead radio. The radio is playing something of an 80s flavor. His glance continues its stroll about the room. Coming around it settles on me. I look into his eyes. They are fixed in a perpetual squint, and so I look down. I look over at the waitress, who is sitting across the room on three crates stacked up. "One more?" her glance asks me. I nod.

In my hands I have the collected photos of Victor Kolar. Born and raised in Ottava, Cz he had spent the first half of his life photographing its people. His people.
I sit and remember my days within this pub in mid-January. I had just arrived here then. I sat then too, and attempted to peer inside the people. But I was peering from the outside then.

I realize more and more the paradoxes of travel. We tell ourselves we have seen the world. But what have we really seen? Monuments, sculptures, beggars. How silly must we all look to the monuments and people at whom we peer incessantly through our lenses. Always looking outward, never within.
Friends of friends come, eager to go everywhere, see everything. But glancing around on the tram, they see only the architecture of the faces. It makes for tough tour guiding.

For those of you from the big apple, think of showing an out-of-towner the empire state building, while having yourself worked within it. It's something like that.

And so I look at his face. Lines cut across it like runways over the airport field. For months I have been attempting to peer inside the terminal, but alas in vain. I do not have the proper papers.

But I keep looking, keep clicking the shutter. The waitress brings me my beer. She is blonde and voluptuous, perhaps a bit too much on both counts. Few younger men send their glances in her direction from across the room. They then huddle together. They crack up. She continues moving around the tables. Effortlessly and graciously.

I lower my eyes into the book.

"In fact," Kolar writes in his brief introduction, "even when you are capturing something, it stores itself in you, you remember the moments... they mature and remain as latent material somewhere within, prepared for the moment when you press the shutter release elsewhere..."

I look up, catching the glance of the old man. Seeing that I had not started my beer, he raises his glass to me. I nod, and raise mine as well. We smile.

Kolar better be right.