Matt and the Magic Seashell

A Magic Camera photograph of treasure from forever ago

In ‘Magic Camera,’ I ask people to use a little magical Lego camera to snap a picture of a memory from their life. Then I take the film and develop it into a photo made of letters.

Photographer: Matt Mirshafiee is a yoga teacher in Southern California.

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There are no windows in the room, but when Matt Mirshafiee lifts the Lego camera to his eye and squints through the little viewfinder, he sees himself standing by an ocean stretching away for forever under a blue sky. It’s 7 a.m. and Mirshafiee has just finished teaching yoga. The room is hot and pregnant with Mirshafiee’s electric energy and, now, with the memory of a time long past when he visited the Pacific Ocean on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula. Mirshafiee snaps a photo of the memory just as the past version of himself leaps and dives into the surf. ‘I had just broken up with someone I was in love with,’ says Mirshafiee, who dove into the ocean with the intention to swim with the water, not against it, and to let it take him where it wished. In the memory, Mirshafiee hits the water, and the waves move him this way and that – right-side up and upside-down – and when they’re done with him they set him down safely on the beach. That’s when Mirshafiee finds it: the seashell. Right next to him is a collection of seashells of different sizes and colors, and one of the shells sings to Mirshafiee more than any of the others. He takes the shell and tries to keep it in hand as he dives again into the waves – but the churning water slips into his hand and steals the shell from him. ‘I was trying to swim for it, but I couldn’t get to it,’ Mirshafiee says, who, looking back at his memory with the distance of years, sees how his focus was only on the shell he lost – on the boyfriend he lost – and not on the rest of the world around him. ‘I didn’t realize that it was preventing me from seeing all the other treasures there in front of me on the beach,’ says Mirshafiee, whose powerful voice dances like the leaping, laughing waves in his memory. Those treasures include how there were more palm trees than people on the beach, and how he was there with a new friend he’d made named Philippa. It’s the sort of lesson that maybe only flowers after a dark night of pain, but when you loosen your grip on the way things once were, morning light can strike and old memories can glitter in ways they didn’t before. Now, peering through the magic camera, Mirshafiee sees treasure everywhere: on the beach, and in his even older memories of his boyfriend, who had a knack for making magical moments happen. It’s all there, glittering inside his photograph. ‘Love is not attachment; love is not control,’ says Mirshafiee, who lowers the camera and lets the forever-ago ocean take his glittering memory where it wishes.