A dozen frames

Now that the dust has settled from graduation season, and the young ‘uns have been launched into the world, I think back to some of the advice I used to hear. I usually ignored it, thank goodness, but some of it was worth remembering.

Well, here’s a keeper. A Navy A-7 pilot offered this to me and a pal: “Your whole professional life boils down to a dozen frames on the wall. That’s all. So don’t waste your time on anything that isn’t a wall-hanger.”

Back then, when we thought about photos we thought in terms of dozens, because camera film came in those increments: 12, 24, and 36. So saying a dozen frames on the wall didn’t really mean exactly 12, but was just a convention of approximation.

As for the jet jock, his favorite wall-hanger was in his office, a photo of several A-7 jets flying in formation, one of which he was flying. Now that’s a wall-hanger.

Some of the best wall-hangers I’ve seen have come from mariners, including one guy I knew who sailed a small sloop all over the tropical Pacific. He had been a carpenter for years, until he finally saved up enough money to buy a boat and follow his horizons.

Another guy I knew had gold fever. He quit normal life in order to become a hard rock miner. He was in his 80s when he took me to his mining claim, or, as he said, his “diggings.” This guy’s wall-hangers seemed like straight of an old West movie.

One guy I knew had served in the Army in the Vietnam war and then, after his return home, started a ranch. His wall-hangers were split between the two realms, infantry operations in the jungle, and cattle roundups in the mountains.

And then there was the struggling rock n’ roll singer. His band played local gigs but never hit the big time. They recorded one album, which they self-financed. It fizzled. After a decade of struggle financial reality could no longer be denied. The singer became just another salary man with a desk job, but he got himself some cool rock n’ roll wall-hangers, which were very important to him.

Of course, the big idea here isn’t merely the wall-hanger itself. If it was, you could just rip photos out of magazines and frame them. No, the idea is that when you capture the image, you capture the experience; that’s your experience, and your life.

Some professions are more photogenic than others, we have to admit, and, likewise, we also have to admit that a picture on the wall doesn’t replace money in the bank. A wall-hanger without a wall to hang it on is a pretty scary concept.

You could cook up a dark, philosophical sci-fi story about this stuff, where, say, some trust-fund billionaire offers to buy some photos, and all the associated memories (via brain download), from some adventurous guy who went broke. The late Roald Dahl would’ve been just the guy to pen something like that.

Back in the day, photos weren’t free, or particularly cheap, to produce. And what was produced wasn’t always high quality. For the gray hairs out there, many of their (well, our) best memories are memorialized in grainy, blurry little snapshots, maybe even in black-and-white. Today’s cameras would have been regarded as science fiction even a generation ago.

The days of 12, 24, or 36 photos are so far gone that most people probably don’t remember them. A modern camera, something cheap, like you’d buy at the drug store, can hold over 10,000 pictures on the memory card, depending, of course, on the technical specifics.

Meanwhile, our virtual walls are limitless. So the constraints have cross-canceled: People can now put an infinite amount of stuff on an infinitely-sized space. By contrast, the notion of a mere dozen frames, limited to a square yard of wall space in your study, seems like an anachronistic constraint.

But you don’t sharpen a spear by putting more material at the tip. You sharpen it by taking away material. Thinking in terms of a dozen fames can sharpen our focus.

After all, while the horizons of technology seem infinite, our lives are not.