Nothing Is Happening In This Picture.

This is one of hundreds of shots I have taken while standing behind the sidelines waiting for something to happen. As you can see nothing happened.

But I think taking these pictures is a part of how we parents at this technological and cultural moment make sense out of what we’re doing. Why we’re spending all these hours on the sidelines. And mostly? Nothing happens.

Being a parent is a remarkable thing. Even when we’re watching terrible games. Hopeless games. Banal play. Bored teams. Outmatched rivals. When we’re standing watching a game — any game we can be carried away by emotional swells that are unlike any other.

As we watch, we hope that we get the chance to bear witness to a transformative moment. An achievement. A transition. We watch through the misery, the mistakes, the moderation, the near-misses. Because any second…who knows what could happen?

This hope is so strange, because it exceeds our self. Exceeds in both ways: we hope for something that actually has nothing to do with us, and but it isn’t just that our hope is fixated on something other than our own selves — it’s also that our hope is, itself overwhelming. We want him (or her) to just gracefully miraculously touch that ball and make it soar across the field and into the annals of history. We want these unlikely moments probably more than we actually ever wanted them for ourselves. Too many of us have witnessed parents on the sidelines given over so fully to this hope that the hope becomes lost in negative emotions: anger, frustration, fear, and ambition.

For me the camera is a way to ground the hoping in more reasonable behaviour.

As a film lover, I know from André Bazin that the great gift of cinema is that it represents a moment of reality to us in a way that really invites us to see the moment for all it’s holiness. Once I grasped this idea, I’ve rarely felt impatient with a film. I just ask myself: what is being revealed to me in this long quiet pause? And I realize that I am, in that moment opened up to far more than I expected to be.

Movies that are created to invite such transcendence are a gift. And when I make films I always want to discover these moments, but I never imagined that these moments could find me in ways that exceeded my expectations.

For me, I film and photograph soccer games, and water-skiing, and cello playing and team-art-projects for my kids, because it is a way of being more present, and MAYBE a way of channeling all that excitable hope that builds in my parental sideline eyes.

I never consciously entertain this fantasy, but the fact of my perpetual camera insists that it’s true: I want to accidentally capture a great moment of transcendence.

The thing about sidelines is that we think we’re watching our kids, but really we’re invited to understand ourselves. Maybe this is a ritual that clarifies what parenting actually does for us.

Maybe even a ritual that spreads wider and clarifies what it means to support another. We spend a LOT of time looking at nothing, but the vision we emerge with makes it worth all the nothing.

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