A thing you can’t do very well with a phone camera is capture the light that made you stop even as you were racing to school to pick up your daughter on time. But there are compensations. The phone camera comes close enough for the viewer to guess, and in between that guess and the light-asit-was stands me. The mediation. Perfect camera tech creates the illusion of unmediated vision. That amazing picture that looks like it’s real? That’s a deception. This—sort of what it looked like, something like what I saw, something like what I felt—is the truth.