Hard drive crash and the Zen of emptiness

I decided a few months ago that I wanted to enter some of my photos in the county fair competition in August.

Procrastinating as long as I could, I finally plugged in my hard drive a few days ago to begin the arduous task of looking through 40,000 digital pics to find the four I like best.

I turned on the drive.

"Folder is empty," it said.

I turned off the hard drive, turned it back on.

"Folder is empty."

I turned off the computer, turned it back on.

"Folder is empty."

I went downstairs, came back up.

"Folder is empty."



Now here's the deal. Technology is the part that I HATE about today's art world. In order to be a contender, you have to have the right side of the brain working AND the left side. You can't just be good at composition and subject matter. You have to know raw vs. jpeg, tungsten lighting vs. studio light and how to merge layers in PhotoShop. Technology isn't just for the pro shooters, either. Any 22-year with a Mac knows how to do this stuff.

And then there's me. I get panicky when I try to set a clock. But I love to take pictures, and so I take it one step at a time, even as I simultaneously fight the technology, refusing, even, to back up my pictures with a second hard drive.


"I actually think it might be a good thing if my hard drive crashes," I once told Blood Sistah 3. "Maybe a clear hard drive would make me realize the impermanence of life. I could live into the Zen concept of emptiness."

Be careful what you ask for and all that, blah de blah: For the past two days, while the computer gurus at the local shop worked on my hard drive, I wasn't sure whether I would ever see those 40,000 pics again. I did find a few photos on CDs that I had made, enough that I was able to pull together a collection of four for the photo contest. I knew I had a bunch of albums on Facebook that I had culled from my collection. Certainly, I still had all the hard-copy pictures from decades of pre-digital shooting. Meanwhile, all the pictures I took with my Nikon D 80 digital during these past two years, all the weddings I've shot, the New Orleans Jazz Fest shots, the senior high school photos -- those would be gone.


Except they wouldn't be. They would be in my brain.

"I'm actually feeling pretty calm about this," I told Blood Sistah 4 on Day 2. She is a video producer, who works with computers and images, who just lost her own hard drive a few weeks ago. "I think if I lost all my writing, I would be devastated. I couldn't easily conjure that back up. As for my pictures, I am a visual person. Each and every one of those pictures is etched on the hard drive on my brain.

It's true I'd never see them again in high resolution. But truly, it makes me nervous to be so attached to a little black box, like my world would end if it did. What am I going to do with all those pictures anyway?

Then, just a few minutes ago, I got the call from the guy at the computer shop.

"We got all of 'em back. You can pick up your new hard drive later today."

Thank God.