I’ve just got back from holiday. I didn’t take pictures.
This wasn’t a conscious decision. I don’t have a camera, not even in my phone. If I need to photograph something, I’ll borrow one from my family. Photos for me are generally functional, like showing off some sketches without needing a scanner. This is why my Flickr account has so few photos.
No one else brought a camera either, so there are no holiday photos. But is this necessarily a bad thing? Photography is more than ever accessible to the masses. The media is just catching on to the possibilities brought to life by “citizen journalists” armed with camera phones. CCTV is everywhere. Our lives are documented in pictures more than ever before.
This is not a manifesto. I have no great crusade to wage against the mass of photographs accruing around us, the ever-increasing informational baggage we carry. All I have is a fear, and a question.
My fear is that the individual will become overwhelmed. That the people we are will become externalised to such an extent that the internal person withers away, and all we have left are endlessly repeated mirror images of our shells. That ‘primitive’ people were right: the camera steals a part of your soul.
My question is, how much do we think? How much do we think before we take photos, before we record not our lives but a momentary slice of a tiny aspect of external existence? Do we consider whether a photograph is a meaningful representation of its subject, whether it has any depth or greater reference? Are we taking these representations—for that is what they are—to be more important than they ought to be? Is the weight we assign to photographs, because of the power of the image—sight is the most powerful of our senses, and the one we assign the most authority to—more than, perhaps, it should be?
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I mainly rely on memory for images, but occasionally there are things I want to photograph because there was something about the vantage point my memory won’t recall well, or else (more often) I want to show someone else what I saw.
In youth I excitedly photographed friends I had known for a few weeks, in part to remeber them (and oddly when I recall those times it’s the photographs that come first to mind). One friend was sitting in the white-walled top-floor dorm room, the ceiling slanted with the roof and the oppressve heat soaked up by slate roofing baking us. On a pale blue comforter (or something) she sat reading with long blonde-brown hair, half as long as her body, in a ponytail with round glasses, wearing a white tank top and robin egg blue shorts while the sun overlit everything we could see through the window, trees, the adjacent building down the hill, the sky. I ran the entire length of the hall to get my camera, there was something perfectly beautiful about this that needed capturing.
Developing the roll weeks later, away from my friends, I found the perfect photograph half-obscured by a blurry chunk of pale peach- my finger was over the lens. It’s one of those perfect jokes of my life, but thinking of it, having the photograph, reminds me of what it actually looked like.
In another example, my brother’s sister in law Missy (my sister in law’s sister, which is correct?) and I were my neice’s godparents, so there’s a picture of me holding her with Missy standing next to me, smiling while Rachael squirms a little in her Christening gown. When Rachael recieved her first holy communion / confession, we recreated the photo, of course Rachael was eight or so at the time, so she was a little more difficult to hold, but it was great. I’m hoping to continue this up as she recieves additional sacraments to her wedding day, because you can’t pass up that kind of tableau.
In short (too late!) I don’t think I abuse the ability to capture images, there’s usually something really specific in mind when I do.
SquidDNA August 15th, 2005