It's the living that haunt the homes
of the dead, wanting something
from them we can't articulate,
something we can only gesture dumbly towards...
· Michael Crummey, Finnish Cemetery Revisited

I bought a Yashica-Mat LM. I found it in an antique store, across the street from NSCAD. It wasn't expensive. The proprietor said, The lady who brought that in said she'd still been using it until recently. He wrapped it in newspaper and put it in a plastic bag. It was surprisingly heavy.

It is a stout, serious camera, its twin lenses like thick spectacles, tilted sidelong. It lifts its lid as if tipping its hat. It is habitually quiet, at least it likes to think so; its hearing is not what it used to be. It is polite to the point of being reticent, and a bit of a pessimist. It believes since there is nothing good to say it is better to say nothing at all. It reads the newspaper every day. It is observant, but slightly farsighted, and keeps a minimum distance of 3.2 feet from the subject of its scrutiny. It prefers overcast days, and autumn. It likes books without pictures, or books with nothing but pictures, but not both at the same time.

I noticed the tombstone of Frederick Fishwick because someone had hung a pair of keys on it. People shortcut though Camp Hill Cemetery quite a bit. Probably someone had dropped their keys and someone else had put them up where they'd be seen; common folly, common courtesy. A few hours earlier in a bookstore nearby I'd found a book of essays about photography being all about loss - a way of pinning things to paper, a method of holding on to the dead. I didn't buy the book, but it was in my head as I walked through Camp Hill. In the past, finding myself in a graveyard with a camera in my hands, I've felt uncomfortable taking photos... it can come across as a kind of intrusion, a faux-pas, something like sneezing in church. With the Yashica-Mat, though, it feels appropriate - partly because the camera is old, and partly because it is quiet. It's a twin lens reflex, and lacks the familiar clack of a mirror flipping up. Just the flicker of the diaphragm shutter, almost inaudible, a sound like five leaves snapping from five branches simultaneously. One looks down into the camera, as if into water. The image swims. Because I never lift the lens to my eye, it is less intrusive. Innocuous, a little shy. A camera for downcast eyes.

I am baffled by this camera. Taking a photograph involves a lot of fussing and adjusting. It takes time. It fails to focus on anything closer than three feet away. The fresnel lens reverses things and becomes a kind of Rubik's cube to wrap my mind around. Things tend to fall out of the frame. And I'm not used to seeing in squares. But somehow all its little eccentricities become possibilities, and I am intrigued. This camera is a crystal ball cupped in my hands.

No one searches for lost objects in a cemetery. Everything in a cemetery was lost long ago, and everyone knows exactly where it is. The stones are our signposts. Perhaps the keys have been there for decades already, like the moss and the fallen cross. Time moves slowly in a cemetery. The trees grow tall here. Trees make good caretakers for the dead; they move at the same speed.

It's only when I'm standing still that I understand any of this. I write in my notebook,

with every click
of my camera, a gravestone leans
one sixtieth of a second
into eternity

What does Fishwick think? He winks, and says nothing. They are his keys now.