6,875 Photos? Yikes!!
Why do we take so many photos?
Many years ago, on a trip to California with a friend, we found ourselves on a beach outside of San Francisco. The sun was beginning to set. A young woman on a horse, riding bareback, slipped into view, a not-to-be-missed Kodak moment. I focused my camera as she cantered along the shore, snapped a photo, only later to realize that the film had not advanced.
What might have become a color print to frame and hang on a wall, remind me of a memorable place I’d been, became instead an image emblazoned in my mind. Details may be hazy — was she wearing white? Was her hair in a ponytail or flying freely in the breeze? How many shades of purple and pink were in the sky? — but something much deeper is what stays with me.
Memories are made of these. Now that we have phone cameras almost always at the ready to point and click for any reason (or no reason), deliberation in taking photos gives way to immediate gratification. With all the reflexiveness of a nervous tic, we pull our phones from pockets or handbags. We hold them up, we zoom in on the subject (often ourselves).
Is this an impulse that has risen to the level of need? Do we do it just because we can? When I take a selfie, it’s often for the silly purpose of seeing what I look like with the bit of distance a mirror can’t give. I share many more selfies with my daughter (a new outfit, a new pair of shoes) than I do on social media. All of which has me wondering if we lose more than we gain in terms of perspective.
Taking photos of artwork at museums used to feel like a cheap thrill, a takeaway from my visit that I could dwell on anytime/anywhere, share on Facebook or Instagram to let friends and followers know what I’ve been up to. At the same time, the very act of taking a photo takes me out of the moment, where the real dwelling on a piece of art takes place. I find myself more and more annoyed, when I should probably be amused, with people using selfie sticks to put themselves in the foreground of what they came to look at.
It may be true that phone cameras and social media have conspired to make a visit to a museum more of a seize-the-moment-by-moment experience. Take a photo of that famous work of art you came to see, move on to the next piece of art. Prove, with a smiling face, that you came, you saw, you posed. It’s a telling picture, in and of itself, that has me imagining a new spin on Mona Lisa’s smile. Why, she might be wondering, are all these people looking away from me?
Historically speaking, the culture of lay photography began with the advent of cameras like the Kodak Brownie and Polaroid, which still makes the taking of photos feel like magic. Susan Sontag says it simply in On Photography: “Cameras go with family life.” And the photos we take tell stories. They jog our memories: The woman standing next to a baby carriage, the child lifted from it and held in her arms. The WWII black and whites of Army buddies. The three couples at a table in a nightclub, all decked out and smiling.
They accumulate, too, don’t they?
Every so often I get the urge to go through boxes stuffed with photos, many in envelopes on which are scribbled dates marking family events or vacations, to see if I can edit them down. Soon enough, sentimentality and nostalgia get the best of me. I find myself spending too much time poring over photos, memories made vivid via 5 x 7 snapshots. Europe on five dollars a day with a college friend. Big Sur with another friend, and later with my husband. My daughter’s early years/teenage years/college years.
Then there are the boxes of photos taken from my parents’ home after they were gone, more pieces of family history. For all my channeling of Marie Kondo, they have too much of a hold on me to be ruthless in my weeding. The question of ditching or dumping them plagues me. If I pick and choose, make it a less overwhelming mess to pore over, maybe my daughter would welcome these glimpses of my life before she came along. Then again, maybe not.
The 2017 film, Kodachrome, tells the story of famous fictional photojournalist Ben Ryder (played by Ed Harris), seeking reconciliation with his estranged son (played by Jason Sudeikis) via a road trip. Ryder has terminal cancer and is fixated on getting to Parsons, Kansas, home to Dwayne’s Photo, about to become the last lab to process Kodachrome. This part of the story is not fiction. December 30, 2010 was the last day the photo lab accepted rolls of film to be processed.
“People are taking more pictures now than ever before,” says Ryder. “Billions of ’em. But, there’s no slides, no prints. They’re just data, electronic dust. Years from now, when they dig us up, there won’t be any pictures to find. No record of who we were, how we lived.”
Hyperbole aside, there will always be a desire to make prints of digital photos but the large bulk of them (organized as they may be) get lost in the cloud, that intangible entity where a seemingly endless accumulation remains hidden.
Until we get a notice — you’re running out of storage — at which point we make a feeble attempt to delete delete delete.
Until it seems like a colossal waste of time and we take the path of least resistance. Purchase more storage space.
There’s at least a touch of irony in my whining. Holiday nostalgia found me trying to recall the year of the last, possibly the best, Thanksgiving I hosted. A quick search in my photo app of course brought up several Thanksgivings past. Turns out the one I was looking for was 2015. Turns out, too, that I have just a handful of photos from that synergistic mix of family and friends.
Maybe we were less obsessed back then, more selective in making memories, giving them more space to form on their own.
Maybe one telling photo — two small dogs looking up at my husband as he carves the turkey — is enough to conjure the spirit of the day, all of us too happy eating, drinking, talking, laughing to step out of time for the purpose of preserving it.
