The Camera as Sports Equipment

Take a look at this picture. It's a, so to speak, hole, in a game of Junkyard Golf as played during Leadership Training Camp at Southwest Airlines. You see here standard Junkyard Golf equpiment: a collection of junk. Note the use of the green swimming pool inner tube as a, well, cup, for example, and the cunning placement of the toy obstacles and cardboard box ramp. The only thing missing is the club, unless, perhaps, that inflatable harmless head-basher on the left is the club. Which might mean, perhaps, that the toys are not obstacles, but the balls themselves.

The only piece of Junkyard Golf equipment that you can't see is actually not junk at all. It's the camera they used to take this picture.

It took me three, maybe four years to realize this. Junkyard Sports was published in 2004. Well, really in the fall of 2003. So that means that I had it completed by the spring of that year, so give me another year for writing and revising. O, my gosh, it is 4 years!

Now that I think about it, cameras are sports equipment in every sport you can think of. But in Junkyard Sports, you might not think of cameras at all. After all, it's all about junk, and people having fun, it's not about taking pictures. And you'd be just as wrong as I was.

See, Junkyard Sports are what you call "evanescent." No two games of, for example, Junkyard Golf, are alike. And I don't mean snowflake-non-alikeness, I mean species. And every time we play, we don't want to let go of what got made - not without showing it off to the world, without stamping it into the virtual permanence of at least a digital photo. Because it's new, ingenious, lovely, and we made it. Because it's got to be captured before we can finish with it.

And photographs themselves, the very definition of photographs, are changing. As the visionary Sascha Pohflepp says:

Photography has become a networked process. It no longer ends with pasting putting prints into an album. Instead, making them public through services like Flickr is rapidly becoming one of the main ways how we treat our visual memories. The photographic process extends from preserving a moment to an act of telecommunication, with numerous implications on how we perceive reality, how we make our memories and how we create a narrative from it.

Which is why I am now deciding that cameras are as important to the sports part of Junkyard Sports as they are to the junk parts. They make it possible for us to complete the game without anybody really winning - just everybody, really.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith