I have been divided on this for some time: can one take too many pictures?
I grew up in the days when one had to make quite an investment to purchase and develop film. (Developing pictures took a week, postage, patience...). In those days, I think people took pictures more mindful of the result, more attentive to the content. I have never been a photographer, but I was always frugal in my photography, snapping what I considered meaningful photos. (There was, I must admit, a period in my youth when I shot everything! I developed rolls of film from my little Kodak Instamatic yielding nothing much, just lots of cute girls spotted on my vacation, etc.)
I also respect those who by faith and tradition do not like their photos to be taken. See Aniconism. I think we need to be considerate of people who, for whatever reason, do not want captured on film, whether it is just vanity or because they are wanted by authorities. I am also worried whenever my children are photographed, knowing there are (literally) hundreds of their pictures on the Internet now. I fear stalkers, pedophiles, etc.
All that said, my wife is a shutterbug! She takes photography classes. She has a photo-a-day website. She has thousands of pics on facebook, etc. She probably has many gigabytes of photos on her hard drive. When people attend parties at our place, they are surprised if there are not pictures being taken constantly.
On the bright side, there are no gaps in the chronicle of our lives. Everything even remotely significant seems to be immortalized in (digital) film. Whether it's a new Lego castle some kid built or graduating from college, it's all there. Kyle back from the war-Snap. Disney on ice-Snap. Even my kids are in on the act. Chicken lays a big egg-Snap. Chicken poo looks like Italy-Snap.
Our eldest has had so many pictures taken, so many scrapbook pages made of him...he uses these to recollect days gone by. The others have not been forsaken, but they are surely not so thoroughly documented as the eldest.
This, then, leads me to the question I'm wrestling with. When Jax reviews these pictures, how much of what he rattles off is truly memory, and how much of it is reconsititued by pictures he's looking at? Is it memory or is it "photographic memory," pardon the twist on the phrase. I wonder sometimes if making it easy to "remember" by capturing everything in digital images might somehow make it harder to really forge memories.
It's the same information retrieval question I was working on a month or more back. In this era of electronic memory and information, how much content is going to find some traction, some stick, in our true meatspace memory? If it's so easy to access every cake, candle, and present ever received, why would one go to the labor of really remembering it, when it can just be retrieved on a file and reviewed.
I like fond memories and special pictures. I am not so partial to what I am considering an over-documentation of life.
Hmmmm.
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3 comments:
I have found that I don't take as many photos when I'm around people as I used to - I realized that I was separating myself from truly experiencing the people and event(s) by constantly watching it all through a lens.
So, yes, I have found that I can take too many photos.
That said, photos can also be a good memory jog. For example, I don't think I would have remembered that dress I made (and did such a nice job on) in high school if I didn't have several photos of myself in it. Certainly photos are less cluttering than saving every item we might want to remember!
Did some chatting with my wife over the overall topic, and we expanded this to a cultural perspective. It's an old saw, but how much does the imagery of the media sculpt our collective memory? where's the break point between actual memory and 'recreated' photographic memory? When you see something initially, in real life, and you integrate it into your memory banks, can you call that learning, maybe? and if so, do we re-learn every time we see a different rendition of the same initial sight (as through someone else's camera, point of view, etc)?
I think that there's no question the media definitively shapes our collective memory - indeed, our initial reactions and understandings of events - through photographs and the points of view they choose to publish.
It's so easy to do. As a gardener, for example, I choose to publish photos that make my garden look a certain way or that emphasize what I'm talking about in my post. A closeup of a single flower with 3 insects on it is much more compelling than a shot of the plant from farther away, no matter how covered with insects it is - you just can't see the insects as well.
A photo of a bowl full of colorful tomatoes is much more positive looking than a picture of the half-dead looking vines they were harvested from, no matter how full of ripening tomatoes the vines are.
Conversely, though, someone wanting to advertise their chemical product to encourage you to buy it will want to use the photo of the half dead vine as a way to try to scare you into thinking you need to spend that money to be able to harvest the remaining tomatoes. In fact, they'd be even more likely to focus in closely on the lower, dying leaves of the vine and crop out any image of healthy looking produce.
From the viewpoint of a consumer of media, I think we all need to be very thoughtful of what we see and be cognizant of how we are being manipulated. "Who is gaining what by highlighting this perspective?" should be our first, or at the very least, our second thought in reading a story!
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