Jul 20 - The Documentary Girl

Today I realized I made the right choice.

"What choice is that?" you may ask.

Well, it was my choice to pursue an artisan career, a life of doing good ol' hands-on work.

There's a lot to say about why I've chosen this that I won't go into here. But what I will tell you is that there has been a girl filming a documentary about us at the studio for the past two days. I'm studying stained glass, the same methods used since medieval times. This girl is filming people who are carrying on old professions, like bakers, masons and tapestry weavers.

Her filming in the atelier wasn't so far from my old job - photography. In fact it was quite similar. She roamed around trying to be discreet while sticking a camera in at all angles.

But watching her, I realized I was blissfully pleased not to do that as a career.

She just looked like an outsider, a detached and fairly out-of-it outsider. Everyone was friendly with her, but underneath it all I think the common feeling was "if you want to know what it's like to make stained glass, why don't you just take a class and make a window yourself?".

She comes from academia, anthropology actually, and I supected she might create vast, unnecessary explanations for something that's very simple to understand if you just roll up your sleeves and put your own hands into it.

Trying to observe without participating results in superficiality.

I suspected as much when I was doing photography. It felt superficial too. I got disenchanted after a time. I realized it's so easy to make an image that looks impressive but means absolutly jack-squat nothing. Capture, say, an old Chinese man with a wistful eyes-to-the-heavens expression on his face, and you can make people believe he was wise and soulful. But in reality he may have been looking up to the sky as a brief pause between spitting his tobacco on the ground and hollering at his wife. It's way too easy to cheat with a photo.

Still, it's not bad to do a documentary about old professions just to keep people interested in supporting them and even joining them. I'm all for that. It's good to remind people that not all products come from a factory, and that not all people work in a cubicle. I just don't buy it if this documentary gets too lofty and "reveals" what the profession is about.

So I'm happy with my line of work. I'm cutting, hammering and soldering and I love it.