Take a Picture, What Do You See?
Written for blue_crow for the bsgficexchange
What Paulla had done before the apocalypse was a mystery to everyone around her. Some speculated that she was in politics; some thought she had held a simple job, like a secretary or receptionist; others thought a cop, still others thought her a student, along with a good many other guesses. They were all wrong, of course. But she would never let them know that. The mystery was what gave her her power, what kept her as something above, not just one of the crowd. Good leaders didn’t have pasts. Pasts were what came to destroy you. She’d observed enough scandals to know that.
The truth was, Paulla was a photojournalist before the apocalypse. She had been on her way to cover Tom Zarek’s parole hearing when the cylons attacked. Paulla had no interest in Tom Zarek, just like she had no interest in most of the stories she covered, but it was an easy way to earn some good money. Tom Zarek was hardly big news: people had begun to forget about the bombing, and his book was starting to be viewed less as the rallying call for young activists and more as the rantings of a crazy old coot. And even though the government made a big to-do about his hearing, no one really cared that much, because they all knew what the outcome would be anyway. Fortunately for Paulla, people still pretended to care about Tom Zarek, at least enough that they were willing to pay her for a picture.
It struck her as ironic that after the end of the world, Tom Zarek, a man on the edge of oblivion, was suddenly important again. Then again, the cylons had been beyond the realm of anyone’s thoughts at the time as well. It seemed like a lot of things that hadn’t really mattered anymore suddenly mattered quite a lot.
The first couple weeks after the attacks on and exodus from the Colonies were spent in a waking coma, a suspended state which it seemed no one would ever wake up from. Eventually, when everyone decided they needed to do something with their lives or they would waste away into the deep nothingness of space, the reporter she’d accompanied decided to join the Fleet News service. He’d asked her to come along, but she’d declined. It seemed pointless to her. What was news these days but the cylons, and why did you need to listen to someone talk about them as distant subjects when they were already at your front door? “News is not news to the people living it,” a colleage had once told her.
Paulla instead decided to become a photographer again. It was widely accepted knowledge in the world of lenses and zooms that photojournalists were not photograhers, and vice versa. They used the same equipment, the same techniques, but they were hardly the same. Once upon a time, long before the cylons attacked, Paulla had been a photographer. When she had stopped being a photographer and became a photojournalist, she was not able to pinpoint, but it must have happened at some time. Paulla swore that it wouldn’t happen to her when she joined the field of news photography, that she could maintain both identities, but like so many other things, she had been wrong.
Paulla remembered when she had graduated from art school on Caprica. She’d been so young and optimistic then. The world was a beautiful place, and she was going to capture it all. She quickly discovered, however, that jobs for photographers were hard to come by. Four months passed by in a portrait studio, before Paulla decided she had had enough of screaming children and bossy mothers. She’d been lucky, getting a job at a newspaper. Most photographers ended up having to change fields altogether, when they didn’t want to work in portrait studios anymore. She’d been eager to take the job, not only because it offered her the opportunity to travel, but because it gave her the opportunity to be artistic once again. She’d seen the shots in magazines like Living and The Virgonian, prize-winning photographs that seemed to capture the human soul at its very essence. They were thrilling, they were grotesque, they were touching, they were shocking, they were beautiful. She wanted to be that photographer.
But as she learned, as she should have known all along, a photograph is never just a photograph.
To get that shot of the mother crying in the courtroom during the trial of her child’s murderer, she’d have to listen to gruesome testimony and watch as the family and friends of the slain had to relive the worst moment in their lives all over again. To take pictures of victims of a terrorist attack, which would earn her the top of the front page, she’d have to watch as people stood bleeding and screaming in agony while she did nothing to help them. She couldn’t: it wasn’t in her job description. Pain, suffering: these were what prize-winning photographs were made of. It was artistic, but it was not beautiful. To Paulla, there was no beauty in watching another man’s unalleviated misery.
It made her cold, watching all the negative in the world on a regular basis. She could no longer bring herself to care about the subjects of her photographs. You couldn’t, in the world of photojournalism, or it would break you. And with that loss of feeling came the loss of passion. It was no longer about art anymore. It was merely about the job.
And yet, is was at humanity’s lowest point of misery that Paulla swore to become a photographer again. What Paulla expected to find out here, in the depths of space, she didn’t know. They had just lost everything, were chasing after a planet that might not really exist, their gods beaten, and now they floated all alone in a vast, empty universe. Hope was a precious commodity, and to have it made one the richest man alive. Her subjects needed to be the people; the scenery demanded it. But what was there in the people but emptiness?
Paulla traversed the fleet for weeks, looking to find something. All she saw was more of what she felt inside: bleak. It seemed as though the artist in her had died.
One day, however, she found what it was she was looking for. It was on board the Hitei Kan. Conditions were abyssmal. Eighteen hour days, scorching heat, safety hazards, and dirt and grime that seemed to get everywhere. She didn’t know where the feeling had come from, but she suddenly felt compelled to do something. In her old Colonial life, this situation would have seemed commonplace to her, but now, after the end of the world when things shouldn’t have worked like they did before, this mistreatment of people seemed wrong. She took a multitude of photographs that day.
After that, Paulla made it her mission to expose the injustices committed within the fleet. She traveled from ship to ship, taking dozens of photographs. Each batch she sent to Colonial One, hoping to get the President’s attention. She received not one response. Paulla had finally been in a place to help people with her photography, but it still did no good. She finally gave up when she ran out of film.
The lesson she drew from the experience was one that stemmed from her days in the world of photojournalism. She’d seen it on a daily basis, had almost come to take it for granted: violence was the only way to get people to listen. Violence was what gripped people; it shook them up, forced them to take heed. It had never been Paulla that had gotten people’s attention. It was those she’d reported on, people like Tom Zarek. Maybe Tom Zarek wasn’t well-liked, but people listened to him. People were still listening.
It was then that Paulla traded in her camera for a gun. She’d been one of the first to join the Resistance on New Caprica. Those four months served only to prove her right.
Some may have called her hypocritical for joining the so-called Cult of Baltar, having been an ardent member of the Resistance. But those people only saw what was on the surface. For Paulla, it wasn’t about Baltar as a man, not like it was for some of the others, people like Tracey Ann. It was that Baltar had become the voice of the marginalized, in a way that Tom Zarek had clearly ceased to be. Baltar was a last resort, a hope for the hopeless. Paulla had run out of hope a long time ago. More importantly, Baltar had figured out a way to get people to pay attention. Important people. They may have passed him off as a lunatic or a criminal, but they were listening. Paulla knew she had to be allied with this man, if she was going to continue to survive.
As for belief in the One True God, that had been simple as well. It had been clear from the attack on the Colonies that this god was far more powerful than anything humans could dream up. If there was any way to sway that god to their side, she was damn well going to try.
Paulla no longer thought about her camera. Even if it still had any film left, it would have served no purpose anyway. This was not a world where photographs held any meaning, except to showcase the dead like trophies on a wall. And it certainly wasn’t a world where art could survive. All those things- creativity, aesthetics, beauty-had died along with their civilization. They simply did not exist anymore. Society had too much else on its hands.
So she told no one. There would have been no point in anyone knowing anyway.
The raptor buzzed and hummed as it pulled out of the hangar deck and off into space. Gaius had just handed leadership of the Cult over to her, a fact which made her proud, and perhaps even happy for the first time in a long time. Finally, something she had done had paid off. Tracey Ann sat next to her, a tear rolling down her cheek, preemptively mourning the loss of Gaius, either through death or by other means. Jeanne sat contentedly with her son, the young boy excited to see something beyond the walls of Galactica again, and his mother soaking in his enjoyment. The man who’d been saluted as Admiral gazed out longingly beyond even the stars, as if searching for something. Romo Lampkin, unreadable as always through his sunglasses, sat back at peace, not alertly observing as usual, but satisfied to just be for the moment. His dog panted happily next to him.
There was something in that raptor that Paulla thought had ceased to exist a long time ago. Hope. It was faint, but it was there. Sometimes, the things no one else notices are what make the most beautiful photographs.
‘My gods,’ thought Paulla. ‘I wish I had my camera.’
What Paulla had done before the apocalypse was a mystery to everyone around her. Some speculated that she was in politics; some thought she had held a simple job, like a secretary or receptionist; others thought a cop, still others thought her a student, along with a good many other guesses. They were all wrong, of course. But she would never let them know that. The mystery was what gave her her power, what kept her as something above, not just one of the crowd. Good leaders didn’t have pasts. Pasts were what came to destroy you. She’d observed enough scandals to know that.
The truth was, Paulla was a photojournalist before the apocalypse. She had been on her way to cover Tom Zarek’s parole hearing when the cylons attacked. Paulla had no interest in Tom Zarek, just like she had no interest in most of the stories she covered, but it was an easy way to earn some good money. Tom Zarek was hardly big news: people had begun to forget about the bombing, and his book was starting to be viewed less as the rallying call for young activists and more as the rantings of a crazy old coot. And even though the government made a big to-do about his hearing, no one really cared that much, because they all knew what the outcome would be anyway. Fortunately for Paulla, people still pretended to care about Tom Zarek, at least enough that they were willing to pay her for a picture.
It struck her as ironic that after the end of the world, Tom Zarek, a man on the edge of oblivion, was suddenly important again. Then again, the cylons had been beyond the realm of anyone’s thoughts at the time as well. It seemed like a lot of things that hadn’t really mattered anymore suddenly mattered quite a lot.
The first couple weeks after the attacks on and exodus from the Colonies were spent in a waking coma, a suspended state which it seemed no one would ever wake up from. Eventually, when everyone decided they needed to do something with their lives or they would waste away into the deep nothingness of space, the reporter she’d accompanied decided to join the Fleet News service. He’d asked her to come along, but she’d declined. It seemed pointless to her. What was news these days but the cylons, and why did you need to listen to someone talk about them as distant subjects when they were already at your front door? “News is not news to the people living it,” a colleage had once told her.
Paulla instead decided to become a photographer again. It was widely accepted knowledge in the world of lenses and zooms that photojournalists were not photograhers, and vice versa. They used the same equipment, the same techniques, but they were hardly the same. Once upon a time, long before the cylons attacked, Paulla had been a photographer. When she had stopped being a photographer and became a photojournalist, she was not able to pinpoint, but it must have happened at some time. Paulla swore that it wouldn’t happen to her when she joined the field of news photography, that she could maintain both identities, but like so many other things, she had been wrong.
Paulla remembered when she had graduated from art school on Caprica. She’d been so young and optimistic then. The world was a beautiful place, and she was going to capture it all. She quickly discovered, however, that jobs for photographers were hard to come by. Four months passed by in a portrait studio, before Paulla decided she had had enough of screaming children and bossy mothers. She’d been lucky, getting a job at a newspaper. Most photographers ended up having to change fields altogether, when they didn’t want to work in portrait studios anymore. She’d been eager to take the job, not only because it offered her the opportunity to travel, but because it gave her the opportunity to be artistic once again. She’d seen the shots in magazines like Living and The Virgonian, prize-winning photographs that seemed to capture the human soul at its very essence. They were thrilling, they were grotesque, they were touching, they were shocking, they were beautiful. She wanted to be that photographer.
But as she learned, as she should have known all along, a photograph is never just a photograph.
To get that shot of the mother crying in the courtroom during the trial of her child’s murderer, she’d have to listen to gruesome testimony and watch as the family and friends of the slain had to relive the worst moment in their lives all over again. To take pictures of victims of a terrorist attack, which would earn her the top of the front page, she’d have to watch as people stood bleeding and screaming in agony while she did nothing to help them. She couldn’t: it wasn’t in her job description. Pain, suffering: these were what prize-winning photographs were made of. It was artistic, but it was not beautiful. To Paulla, there was no beauty in watching another man’s unalleviated misery.
It made her cold, watching all the negative in the world on a regular basis. She could no longer bring herself to care about the subjects of her photographs. You couldn’t, in the world of photojournalism, or it would break you. And with that loss of feeling came the loss of passion. It was no longer about art anymore. It was merely about the job.
And yet, is was at humanity’s lowest point of misery that Paulla swore to become a photographer again. What Paulla expected to find out here, in the depths of space, she didn’t know. They had just lost everything, were chasing after a planet that might not really exist, their gods beaten, and now they floated all alone in a vast, empty universe. Hope was a precious commodity, and to have it made one the richest man alive. Her subjects needed to be the people; the scenery demanded it. But what was there in the people but emptiness?
Paulla traversed the fleet for weeks, looking to find something. All she saw was more of what she felt inside: bleak. It seemed as though the artist in her had died.
One day, however, she found what it was she was looking for. It was on board the Hitei Kan. Conditions were abyssmal. Eighteen hour days, scorching heat, safety hazards, and dirt and grime that seemed to get everywhere. She didn’t know where the feeling had come from, but she suddenly felt compelled to do something. In her old Colonial life, this situation would have seemed commonplace to her, but now, after the end of the world when things shouldn’t have worked like they did before, this mistreatment of people seemed wrong. She took a multitude of photographs that day.
After that, Paulla made it her mission to expose the injustices committed within the fleet. She traveled from ship to ship, taking dozens of photographs. Each batch she sent to Colonial One, hoping to get the President’s attention. She received not one response. Paulla had finally been in a place to help people with her photography, but it still did no good. She finally gave up when she ran out of film.
The lesson she drew from the experience was one that stemmed from her days in the world of photojournalism. She’d seen it on a daily basis, had almost come to take it for granted: violence was the only way to get people to listen. Violence was what gripped people; it shook them up, forced them to take heed. It had never been Paulla that had gotten people’s attention. It was those she’d reported on, people like Tom Zarek. Maybe Tom Zarek wasn’t well-liked, but people listened to him. People were still listening.
It was then that Paulla traded in her camera for a gun. She’d been one of the first to join the Resistance on New Caprica. Those four months served only to prove her right.
Some may have called her hypocritical for joining the so-called Cult of Baltar, having been an ardent member of the Resistance. But those people only saw what was on the surface. For Paulla, it wasn’t about Baltar as a man, not like it was for some of the others, people like Tracey Ann. It was that Baltar had become the voice of the marginalized, in a way that Tom Zarek had clearly ceased to be. Baltar was a last resort, a hope for the hopeless. Paulla had run out of hope a long time ago. More importantly, Baltar had figured out a way to get people to pay attention. Important people. They may have passed him off as a lunatic or a criminal, but they were listening. Paulla knew she had to be allied with this man, if she was going to continue to survive.
As for belief in the One True God, that had been simple as well. It had been clear from the attack on the Colonies that this god was far more powerful than anything humans could dream up. If there was any way to sway that god to their side, she was damn well going to try.
Paulla no longer thought about her camera. Even if it still had any film left, it would have served no purpose anyway. This was not a world where photographs held any meaning, except to showcase the dead like trophies on a wall. And it certainly wasn’t a world where art could survive. All those things- creativity, aesthetics, beauty-had died along with their civilization. They simply did not exist anymore. Society had too much else on its hands.
So she told no one. There would have been no point in anyone knowing anyway.
The raptor buzzed and hummed as it pulled out of the hangar deck and off into space. Gaius had just handed leadership of the Cult over to her, a fact which made her proud, and perhaps even happy for the first time in a long time. Finally, something she had done had paid off. Tracey Ann sat next to her, a tear rolling down her cheek, preemptively mourning the loss of Gaius, either through death or by other means. Jeanne sat contentedly with her son, the young boy excited to see something beyond the walls of Galactica again, and his mother soaking in his enjoyment. The man who’d been saluted as Admiral gazed out longingly beyond even the stars, as if searching for something. Romo Lampkin, unreadable as always through his sunglasses, sat back at peace, not alertly observing as usual, but satisfied to just be for the moment. His dog panted happily next to him.
There was something in that raptor that Paulla thought had ceased to exist a long time ago. Hope. It was faint, but it was there. Sometimes, the things no one else notices are what make the most beautiful photographs.
‘My gods,’ thought Paulla. ‘I wish I had my camera.’