I’m not sure that I love Halloween becoming an over-involved week-long event, but I also don’t love it becoming any kind of controversy. I don’t love people insisting that it be done this way or that way, I don’t love commandments and communiques about it. If there’s ever been something where we should just let culture happen and work it out by ourselves, with ourselves, without taking to social media and the public sphere, without institutional intervention, it’s Halloween.
Photographs of Halloween are one of those markers in my own catalog. They’re a marker of camera: I can see my dad’s old film cameras in the scans I have of photos from my childhood. I can see my first simple digital point-and-shoot, which generally couldn’t cope with darkness, and I didn’t help, since I didn’t understand the camera at all. And yet one shot I did of my kid looking in a newly carved pumpkin really pulled me in, maybe more than any other, to what light could mean, and when a shot that wasn’t crystal-clear in-focus might still be really visually engaging.
I got a little better with trying not to shake the camera and at setting it for a night shot, if not at carving pumpkins.
But looking at my archive of Halloween shots, it’s also an index of life. Many pictures of young children in costume, from the Halloween parades of early childhood, and then fewer and fewer. The technical challenge is still interesting, but an adult man by himself outside at night on Halloween shooting pictures is not a soothing thing. Nor have I ever been much for going to wild Halloween parties myself, or heading off to a busy street scene to see what I can see.
Still, is there any other time where people do so many fun things with culture and myth? Every Halloween celebration is a concentrated burst of originality—there’s always someone clever, always something fun. Yes, there’s also excess, offensiveness, insensitivity, depending on where you are and who’s in costume, and sometimes that really matters and sometimes it’s really necessary to call that out. There’s no kind of fun that justifies making other people feel really bad, and no kind of fun that entitles you to be completely stupid about what you’re dressing up as. But I still feel it’s a moment in the passing of every year that I look forward to in a basic and simple way.
When I was a little kid---still desperately eager for the '70s prime-time hero's costume sold at the drug store as a thin plastic face mask with an elastic string stapled to either side, with a non-fire-retardant machine-printed theme-tunic---parents didn't dress up to take their progeny around the neighborhood. I wonder what's changed in North-American culture that so many adult parents now take Halloween as a obligated occasion to outfit the family as a cos-play fantasy.