A Late-Night Film Shoot

Last night, a TV drama was being filmed in my neighborhood, late in the evening. It was a fairly large crew, and a corner of the usually quiet night streets was buzzing. When I looked to see where the crew had their camera pointed, it was an ordinary road I walk down almost every day.

Lit up by large lamps, actors were performing right there in front of me. To me it was a completely out-of-the-ordinary sight, but for everyone there, it was the ordinary — their work. In the same place, the everyday and the extraordinary were split between us.

I take photographs too. I’ve shot a lot around my neighborhood. But that road, I’ve never once photographed. I can’t quite say why — it was part of a dull stretch of scenery, a road I only ever passed through.

And that road had been chosen as a set. Someone found a reason to shoot in a place I’d never seen as worth shooting. Looking at the same road, our judgments diverged.

To shoot is closer to choosing than to making. You pick “this one” out of the world. The moment you decide, most of the work is done. All that’s left is to press the shutter.

But even choosing is starting to feel less special. The internet already holds an endless supply of images. AI, too, is generating them in massive quantities in real time. What you can choose from keeps growing. You can shoot with a camera, you can use an image from the internet, you can use an AI-generated one. The threshold for choosing has dropped so low that choosing has come to feel ordinary for everyone.

In a time like this, when I look back at my own sense of things, it seems there are moments when choosing is enough, and moments when it isn’t. I want to leave a trace on what I’ve chosen. I can’t quite explain why, but just looking and choosing leaves me, somehow, without the feeling that anything has stayed with me.