A
few things have happened to me recently that have caused me to think about
photographs and our motivation for taking pictures.
People
take photographs for all kind of reasons.
The
first, and most obvious, is to record a passing event. Photographs of people
who have since died are powerful and valuable things – a window into a
conclusively closed world. We treasure them, and with good reason. Obviously,
video of the same is even more poignant. As technology has progressed, more of
our lives are recorded and going through a handful of old photos is becoming a
thing of the past. Many people have hundreds and hundreds of photos.
The
fact was brought into focus for me recently when a friend died who steadfastly
refused to have his photo taken. As a result, there was no great proliferation
of his image on social media. I had to settle with my memories of him that were
in the mind’s eye. I found that much more comforting. What I also found was
that mutual friends told stories about him rather than showed pictures. I can
contrast this to the death of a much-loved dog last week. Within a few hours
there were dozens of photos of her on social media, many of which I was
responsible for posting. It made me think about visual and non-visual memory,
and I realised that people are becoming quite impoverished in terms of spoken
memories if they do not have photos to rely on.
Digital
media had made photos so cheap that they are no longer special. People have
forgotten how to stand still and pose for a photo because they no longer have
to – the photographer can always take ten more until he or she gets one that is
just right. Twenty years ago each film had twenty-four or thirty-six shots, and
if you got it wrong it cost money.
Add
to that the absence of automatic focus and flash, and you remember the care
with which photos were previously taken. This is something that I suspect
previous generations might also have noticed, as photos changed from once in a
lifetime events created in a studio to snaps taken on a cheap disposable
analogue camera. I have my hunch though that without noticing we have entered a
new age of photography. Photos are now so ubiquitous, cheap and easy to create
that they are starting to lose their value.
My
second rumination relates to the audience for our photographs. When I was a
child, photographs reached only those who were shown the paper copy. Very
rarely, two copies were made so that some could be shared with my grandparents.
I realised when my last grandparent died that actually what happened more
frequently was that a set of twenty-four photos was halved and shared. Going
through photos after her death was a joy, because I saw the other half of the
photos from my childhood for the first time.
The
audience for photographs only ever widened if you were unfortunate enough to
have a relative who had photographs made into slides. You were made to sit and
view them in silence. The point about the 1970s slide show that is relevant to
today was that the photos were still taken without a view to their audience,
which is why it was so boring. The photographer was still taking photos with
only himself in mind. Whilst snapping away at some Roman ruins, the boring
uncle was not thinking of what would be interesting to a wider audience, only
what interested him.
The
obvious point here, of course, is the danger of freeing photographs from paper.
We used to have complete control over who saw photographs. The recent Cloud
debacle shows everyone how little control even the wealthy now have over their
photographs. Nude photos were harder to come by when you had to take them to
Boots the Chemist to be developed. I think that most people are still worried
about this freeing of photography from a physical medium, and technology has
outpaced our ability to set limits and social boundaries. I hope we all catch
up soon.
Digital
photography has caused an explosion of narcissism. If we want to take a
thousand photographs of our haircuts, we can – and lots of people do. What is
different is that everything can now be shared with a potentially limitless
number of people. We can take twenty views of our new kitchen and show them to
everybody we know, and many people that we have never met. As an audience, we
don’t have to look, but most of us do.
I
have now arrived at the Main Part Of The Rant. We have stopped taking
photographs for ourselves. When all we had was analogue technology; photos were
taken for us, and for our families. At the widest point of broadcast, a copy
might be sent to a distant friend, but that was not in the mind of the
photographer when the image was captured.
Many
people now take photographs to impress contacts on social media. When we gaze
through the frame, we are thinking how many people will like our picture, and
how cool it will look, and how everyone will like us a little more because we
take interesting pictures of cool places. There is a danger for many people
that photos are becoming yet another method of impressing people, instead of
capturing the passing of our lives.
It
was really brought home to me recently when I passed the Tower Of London and
saw how many people were taking photographs. I’m not saying they shouldn’t, as
it was an impressive sight that deserves recording. But very few people were
actually just standing and looking. Maybe I am being too cynical, and the
majority were taking photos for themselves. But I suspect that many of the
images were being created with a view to how many Facebook ‘likes’ could be
garnered….
Whether
that is right or wrong is a whole other issue. What I have realised is that I
am going to take fewer photos, and think about why I am taking them, and make
every one count.
