People, especially young people, now take photographs constantly. I heard a comedian say, “I have more pictures of my kid now than my own Dad ever even looked at me.”
I take photographs only occasionally, and when I do, I hope it’s for a good reason. Photography was once inherently wondrous: from the shocking Civil War dead of Matthew Brady to the natural majesty of Ansel Adams, to the power of Life Magazine’s ‘photo of the year’. But smartphones have turned the peacock into a sparrow. Photographs have devolved into the banal: the selfie by that tourist place, the meal at the restaurant. Here it is my friends: “the ordinary—framed!”.
Worse, of the photographs that I do take, I almost never look at them. I barely know how to get them off my goddamned phone and onto my computer, so that I can free up space, throw up and gorge again, like Romans at a feast. Roman stories ended up speaking to us from frescos on ancient buildings buried in dirt; nobody will excavate our stories. If they do, they’ll see that we were so self-indulgent that we couldn’t get enough of our own ordinariness and choked to death on it while real life passed on by, not stopping to help.
Smartphones have become the robots that take over actual experience. They block the oxygen of the moment, stand you in the pose that you must show your friends, and leave you with only a second-hand, knockoff, version of moments of your life that you have actually lived through. You just didn’t live through them while you were living through them, and there is no coming back from that. To experience the memorable without a camera now leaves one feeling that they missed the opportunity of a photograph for social media– versus having gained the opportunity to experience something purely, simply, and without a busy head.
I admit that I sometimes struggle to disregard the impulse to photograph things, but I usually succeed in that disregard and I am grateful for the reality of that success and the consequent success of my reality. But I worry about the next generation–they are hard-wired. And virtual experience, versus the true, could leave them in a fun-house hall of mirrors of life instead of being able to feel and smell the good, the bad, the ugly—the true.
Are there beautiful photographs? Sure. Thought-provoking? Sure. But one can walk unplugged for a few moments anywhere in the world and get it all real-time, and it can be touched, smelled, seen, heard and felt in the soul. I watched my baby learn about the world with his hands, feet, tongue, eyes, ears and beautiful little innocent mind. He seemed happy, overjoyed, and wondrously interested.
Baby steps.
Penultimate 