Fra Lippo Lippi

Yesternight, I was caught red-handed, drooling over the Nikon photographic lens section of the B&H Photo Video online store by the Moral Police, a.k.a. the wife. A chill descended, freezing everything alive while the unasked questions hung in mid-air betwixt her eyeballs and mine:

Why must I be a photographer, if it doesn’t earn me a dime?

Can the family withstand yet another financial typhoon?

And the most incriminating:  If I can’t be a good photographer with the lenses I own, what is the guarantee that the fifth or the sixth piece of glass will make me a better photographer?

Hard pressed to produce anything meaningful, my vocal cords sputtered like a carburettor dying in the middle of a submerged street. I was reminded of Fra Lippo Lippi, the fifteenth-century Florentine monk and painter, immortalised in Robert Browning’s famous dramatic monologue, who was caught wandering by the night guards at ‘an alley’s end where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar’ in a rather colourful section of the city at midnight. Caught in what seemed an apocalyptic moment for him, Lippi burst forth against the hypocrisy of religious leaders who ordained that indulgence in human beauty was sinful, both in life and art. He forcefully argued how the cloistered life of celibacy imposed upon him was unnatural and against the human grain, and how he was actually being truthful to youth, life and nature.

Similarly, will the planet come to a halt and shatter if I falter at seductive displays of voluptuous glass and spend a lecherous moment or two upon pages of such intent? All the more so for a toothless tiger like me whose credit card limits can barely scrape the bottom of a single pro-class Nikkor! Whether these hands would ever lay hold of Nikon’s famed triumvirate—the 14–24, 24–70 and 70–200—and whether my photographs would ever hang in galleries across the world are questions scarcely requiring IBM’s Deep Blue for an answer. Yet aspiring to the image quality of those magnificent lenses makes me work harder still with my humble kit zooms and primes.

Thus, being the owner of kit-class balls, I quickly hit the Ctrl–Alt–Delete combination and slipped in the permafrost of my bed, hoping to wander among the forbidden catalogues in eons to come, and quietly resolving to be a real photographer someday.