It is a wry irony of fate that I should experience profound gratification and fulfillment from the ‘photographic arts’ and that I should have such exceptionally bad luck with cameras. This cosmic stroke of ill fortune can only be explained as a karmic debt from a past life; perhaps I was an unscrupulous photo lab technician in my last incarnation, a sociopath who tinted people’s eyes red in family snapshots. My apparent debt to the universe has followed me from the pocket cameras of my childhood into the 35-mm. of my adulthood, and I now suspect to be burdened with it until the end of my days.

On every trip I have ever taken, my camera has either failed in some major way or died altogether. A week before my first trip overseas (I was working as an archaeological site supervisor in Egypt), I came to the realization that I did not own an "adult" camera. A frantic long-distance phone call to my father (What do I buy? How much should I pay?) produced a spare student camera: a 35-mm single lens reflex (SLR) camera from East Germany, undoubtedly as old as me (the Berlin Wall and I were born in the same year). It was a student camera and I was a student, how difficult could this be? When the Praktica finally arrived – on the day before I was to fly out – I realized that I had no idea how to load the film, let alone how to operate it. My past experiences had hitherto been epitomized by my mastery of the Kodak Pocket Instamatic. I was a graduate student now and was expected to bring back high quality publishable photographs. These images would also grace the screens of future classrooms and send yet unborn students into unfathomable reveries; my supervisor had also insisted that I shoot with nothing but slide film.

"Think of the convenience," he rhapsodized. "You can just walk into any lecture hall with a slide carousel and away you go!"

"Think of the cost of processing," I muttered under my breath.

Holding the slide film in one hand and balancing the camera on my lap, I swallowed my pride and called my brother who, like my father, was a talented photographer and the last repository of good camera karma in my family. That evening he talked me down – a veritable jumper on the edge – through my rants (I don’t understand! What’s an F-stop?) and hysteria (there is no green light that comes on when I press that button) and blatant stupidity (a filter? – how do I know if there’s one on the lens?). By the end of the evening, I had successfully loaded my camera and learned that it did not have a working light meter and yes, a light meter is a handy tool in the desert. Instead, following his advice, I cut the exposure guide from my box of film, taped it to my camera case and hoped for the best.

My first stopover was in Athens where, in between flights, I was able to slip in a bargain basement Aegean "cruise", island hopping with the not-so rich and famous. The sirens who called my name that day were feline for the islands were populated by those languorous Mediterranean cats whose images had recently come into vogue, blinking lazily from calendars and coffee table books the world over. Inspired, I decided that I would create my own portfolio of cats. Consequently, I spent my time in each port of call chasing cats up labyrinthine alleyways, among whitewashed homes with blue shutters and flower pots, sidestepping donkeys and old women bearing baskets of flowers and other tourists (many equally bent on photographing the same cats) – all of which I ignored for the sake of those frigging cats. That night, in the comfort of my cot at the youth hostel, I congratulated myself for my new found skill at changing film and guesstimating exposure settings. Smugly, I knew that I had created something truly enchanting and, at that moment, I experienced my first inkling that a photographer’s life was vastly preferable to that of an Egyptologist.

The film was ruined.

I realized this when I landed in Alexandria and my bags were being checked by the customs agent. A friend of mine had given me what I thought was excellent advice for a lone female traveller: to discourage Egyptian customs agents (who are mainly male) from rummaging too thoroughly through your bags, arrange a layer of feminine pads on top. No Muslim man, she assured me, would want to dig through anything that smacks of feminine hygiene. I happily took this advice because I was also bringing in a bottle of Glenfiddich and was uncertain as to Egypt’s regulations on the importation of alcohol. When the agent opened my bag, he hesitated and looked at me quizzically. The contents of my suitcase looked like a used flotation device: a bottle of shampoo had erupted somewhere across the Mediterranean and its contents, for the most part, had been absorbed by my layer of pads, which had puffed up beyond recognition. The shampoo also ruined what would have been my bestselling sequel to Mediterranean Cats – my ticket to photographic celebrity. Every roll of film (used and unused) had become a sticky sodden canister of goo promising full body and no split ends. At least the scotch was safe.

Once in Egypt, I was compelled to buy (besides hygiene products) more film which included a bad batch that I unwittingly used at the pyramids. Everything turned out yellow. I alone own the only photograph of the sphinx with jaundice. The camels and donkeys suffered from hepatitis A and B respectively. On a horseback trek through the Western desert, the camera would re-cock and shoot every time my horse trotted over a bump (desert landscape is notoriously uneven). Several months later, after processing all of my slides and purchasing a projector, a half-dozen slide carousels and a screen, (during which I considered declaring bankruptcy), I dejectedly forwarded past a few dozen blurred shots of my right foot in a stirrup. With the exception of my "Foot in Motion" series, I was told that I had an eye for composition.

I require little encouragement.

On a subsequent trip to Egypt and Sudan, the camera began to malfunction very early on. As I rewound the film, the winding spools would catch so that several frames were ruined and in very short order, I had shredded an entire roll of film. Hell, it was only the sphinx – it has clearly been over photographed. It dawned on me that I should have had the camera cleaned after my last trip – didn’t somebody mentioned something about sand? My traveling partner was less than sympathetic.

"Throw it away," he ordered. "I am not carrying that piece of crap around."

My partner – whom I will call Satan to protect his privacy – was using a then state-of-the-art Canon automatic 35-mm. The bearer of this technological marvel had only to point-and-shoot: no focusing, no adjusting the light meter, no playing with apertures. Its silvery sleekness mocked my clumsy SLR with its broken light meter, dented body and peeling faux-leather.

"I am not throwing it away!" I cried. "And I didn’t ask you to carry it. It’s my camera, I’ll carry it." I stashed the behemoth into my knapsack.

"Fine but I don’t want to hear you complain once about how heavy your bag is," he warned. "And don’t expect to use my camera whenever you want it and I’m not buying slide film. Nobody uses slides any more – it’s too expensive."

Satan lived up to his name.

On good days I was allowed to use this holy grail of photography. These days were few and far between and hampered by heated arguments, foremost because he had programmed the camera with a date-stamp feature. I begged him to remove it but it remained as permanently set as he was. Consequently, the few pictures of mine from that trip are branded with both date and time in the bottom-corner of each photo. For the record, matting does not always hide this. Most days I sat idly by and watched him take pictures. Sport that he was, Satan later gave me the negatives from which I could make copies of his photographs, most of which I have misplaced or discarded. Satan is the living embodiment of the truism that owning a good camera does not guarantee good pictures; he is also the embodiment of evil but I digress.

Years passed. I left my student days (and my carousels of unused slides) behind and consigned Satan to the sulphurous depths of Hell. My current Significant Other and I began to plan a trip throughout Morocco and southern Spain. In an effort to free myself from my evil karmic spell, I thought matters out, I made plans. I packed another SLR for myself (the Praktica had since been usurped by my brother) and I insisted that my S.O. bring a spare camera. Money was an issue so the back-up camera was a fairly inexpensive point-and-shoot. By the end of our first week (and right on cue), my camera began to exhibit its first symptoms of ill health: I was having trouble advancing the film after I took a photo. By the time we were in the town of El Jedida, I would have to cock the spool winder twice, then three times, in order to advance to the next frame. I was going through slide film like Kleenex. Finally, in Marrakech, after a death rattle in the souks of the medina, the camera died – my S.O. calling it at 4:15 p.m.

"It’s toast," he announced, giving it a final shake.

"But we have to get it fixed!" I sobbed. After my last trips, I clearly couldn’t deal with this.

"There’s a camera shop across from the Jemma al Fna," my S.O. noted. "I’ll try there."

In a state of denial, I immersed myself in the snake charmers and soothsayers of the Jemma al Fna, Marrakech’s central square and matrix of all things magical and bizarre, and waited. Thirty minutes later I saw him dodging the lethal traffic that careens about the square, carrying the camera. I held my breath.

"Well, good news and bad news," he began. He eyed me with trepidation as if I were mentally unbalanced. "The winding pin is broken. It can be fixed but –"

"But?" I grabbed him and shook him violently. "But what???"

"But," my S.O. hesitated, showing visible signs of fear. "They’ll have to order the part and it’ll take about four days. There’s no guarantee that –"

I didn’t hear anything else. It was déjà vu all over again. I was distraught – we couldn’t stay in Marrakech for another four days. My S.O. consoled me, reminding me that we had a backup. We would rise above adversity, but we would also begin fighting over the one remaining camera.

History has a strange way of repeating itself.

A few days later, during an excursion into the Western Sahara, the auto zoom lens on the spare refused to recede back into the camera. It just stayed there menacingly, on a precarious and rather challenging angle.

"Nooo!" I cried, cringing at the lens’ obscene gesture.

"I think we’re screwed." replied my S.O..

He pushed it back in so that the (not very) automatic cover could close over the lens. The motor churned slowly: it worked, or rather, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, and sometimes it closed halfway. Sometimes we couldn’t get the lens cover to open at all. But we had travelling with us a professional photographer from New York City to whom we appealed for help.

"Well," he said, laying aside his three cameras and five lenses. "I think you’re screwed.

My S.O. gave me a triumphant look of validation. I shot him back a look that can best be translated as yeah big deal, you’re right. Our expert in the field kept prodding at it tentatively like it was a dead mouldy thing.

"You could just poke it with something sharp and hope for the best," he suggested.

Poke it with something sharp? – thank you Ansel Adams.

With few (or no) options we took his advice and continued prying it, forcing it with a Swiss Army knife until the whole lens just fell out. We brushed it off, excavating it from the sand like a holy relic, and screwed it back in.

"What about the sand? Do you think sand will get in?" I asked my S.O. feverishly.

"You think it won’t?" he answered.

A few hours later, it plopped back into the sand and again we remounted it.

Repeat last sentence several times.

"What a piece of crap," my S.O. muttered, each time he blew sand off of the lens and remounted it. "$%#&^* must be Japanese for ‘We make shitty cameras’." (Brand name withheld pending litigation).

In an act of moral outrage, I ripped up the instruction booklet (the German and Russian sections mainly), to utilize as toilet paper for the remainder of the trip in the desert. It certainly wasn’t 3-ply but it felt good nonetheless. The camera remained serviceable for another day until the lens fell out one last time during our meanderings in the city of Meknès: giving up the ghost (appropriately) at the door of the mausoleum of Moulay Ismail. I sat on the floor trying to piece it back together while men around me prayed. Briefly I considered enlisting their help, asking for their intercessory prayers; instead we bought postcards and sulked. We have no photographs of Meknès. In our hotel room that night, we sat cross-legged on the bed with assorted camera bits laid out before us and tried to perform surgery. Our efforts at resuscitation were in vain. The camera was gone; it was officially pronounced dead at 10:39 p.m. Again my S.O. called it.

"It’s toast."

"We’re going to Volubilis tomorrow," I lamented. "How can we not take pictures?"

"Let’s see if we can find a camera store in town before we leave," my S.O. suggested.

The next morning we found the said camera store, conveniently located next to a patisserie which sold marvelous almond croissants. Understandably the shopkeeper would have nothing to do with our camera and tried to sell us a replacement. Concerned about funds (we still had almost two weeks of travelling left and I already felt guilty enough about the carpet tied to the back of my S.O.’s knapsack) we opted for a disposable cardboard camera – something that neither of us had ever used before but seemed to make the most sense economically. Standing on the street I eyed the camera with suspicion.

"Yeah, this is going to work just fine," I grumbled, spitting out flakes of sticky pastry.

"Sarcasm noted," retorted my S.O. "Pass me another croissant."

We spent the day at the Roman ruins of Volubilis and the evening hopelessly lost in Meknès’ old city, a medina that rivals Fès for so closely safeguarding the secrets of its tangled passageways. I felt like we were taking photos with a Barbie camera which, in fact, we were. The next morning we capitulated and returned to the camera shop and bought a replacement, a cheap basic Kodak camera with no zoom, a manual advance and a hyper-sensitive auto flash. I feigned optimism outside on the street.

"Well, at least we can still use slide film," I offered, spitting out flakes of sticky pastry.

"Well that’s a bonus," he said (cheeky monkey). "Pass me another croissant."

This would be the camera that would have to last us through the remainder of North Africa and all of Spain. This would be the camera that would capture the palace and gardens of the Alhambra, the pièce de resistance of our travels – the jewel of the Moorish crown. To its credit, it did not die or malfunction until we reached the Alhambra in Granada where the weather became churlish. Torrential downfalls were punctuated by brief cloudy periods. The auto flash fired off continuously during each deluge and every time a cloud passed overhead (which was every three minutes). Because I had lost my ticket to the royal palace, we were forced to purchase another ticket and return there the next morning. I was determined not to leave without seeing its famed court of the lions, the seraglio and court rooms, its brilliant tile work, the dizzying stucco of its public and private rooms, its marble-columned arcades, its beehive and stalactite ceilings, and honeycombed domes.

And every goddamn magical moment would be captured on film. Slide film.

Early the next morning, after a night blurred by generous amounts of sangria, Cruz Campo beer and bulls’ tails, we returned to the Alhambra to marvel at its splendour. The flash of our little Kodak fought valiantly against the darkness of the morning (no daylight savings’ time here). Snap, snap, snap – we took pictures of it all. We even vowed to send Kodak a thank you letter after we returned:

They would produce a television commercial featuring us. They would even fly us to Spain and Morocco for authenticity. We would become wealthy from the residuals. We even harboured hopes of having fulfilled our karmic debt.

Then we processed the film.

The images from the original SLR bear a pallid ghostly smudge in the bottom-right corner, presumably from my incessant re-cocking. The mosques and jellaba-ed men in my Tangier appear standing in pools of drifting snow – an interesting trick when you think about it. The photos from my S.O’s camera turned out remarkably fine – even those that can be dated to its wandering-lens-in-the-desert phase. We haven’t figured that one out yet. We returned the remains of his camera to the department store that sold it to us (you have to love a liberal return policy). There’s something wrong with it, we blinked innocently, dropping its parts and a few ounces of sand into the hands of the customer service representative. He asked about the missing instruction booklet. Instruction book? Was there an instruction book? we looked at each other blankly. We received a full refund.

The disposable camera’s photos from Volubilis will be reserved for spare toilet paper on our next desert trek. It is always edifying to have something cultural and colourful with which to wipe your bum. Alas the Alhambra photos fared the worst; I may submit them to an art gallery for a disquieting introspection on Granada entitled "Meditations on Black and Grey: an Andalusia Odyssey". Amazingly, these mishaps have not discouraged me and my S.O. (now my husband) from subsequent and future travels. As a token of cosmic goodwill, of the two cameras that we brought along on our honeymoon to Paris, only one died and it was on our last day – surely a sign that our union is blessed from above. I still take slides and cannot fathom the appeal or usefulness of digital cameras – where is the sense of spontaneity and adventure? I have a closet stacked with carousel boxes, a leaning Tower of Pisa of photographic horrors and delights. "Think of the convenience", my supervisor had once said. Convenience indeed, but I have no complaints.

Nor do I harbour any delusions that I have relieved myself of my bad karma (which my husband inherited by virtue of marrying me) for it continues to this day, or that my fate is not inexplicably bound to clumsy SLR’s and slide projectors. But I now wear it as a badge of honour, a cosmic imprint that I will bear with fortitude until I am able to acquit myself of it. Clearly, if I return as a baby photographer at Sears in my next life, I will know that I failed the photo-gods. But if the "The Goats of Tunisia" becomes a bestselling coffee table book and begets legions of calendars, notepads and potholders, then I will consider myself blissfully debt-free.