Put the Camera Down
I have a vivid memory from a couple years ago. On a plane, I watched a young girl in front of me pull out her phone when we began to taxi. The day was dull, the Potomac flat in the distance. I was duly bored by the airport’s dull concrete, but the girl hit record when we reached the runway and I watched the whole routine from her screen: the blur of the tarmac, the earth falling away, the slow, quotidian climb into the troposphere until we broke through cloud cover. She had recorded all of it—all ten minutes of ascent. To her, this wasn’t just takeoff: this was flight.
I smiled at her. My guess is she will never go back and watch that video again, at least not in its entirety. If she’s anything like me, she’ll probably stumble upon it when she’s clearing out her storage and wonder what she was thinking, taking such a long video. But her young heart was crying out with a longing that I think is familiar to all of us, a longing to preserve something we feel to be fleeting, but valuable.
Since then, I’ve wondered about our relationship to the cameras in our pockets. I began noticing the way my friends, my family, and I lived our lives through our screens. We'd record a concert, a hilarious exchange, a touching moment, or anything worth remembering, as it happened, to then relive it only hours later. When conversation was no longer sufficiently engaging, we would turn to rewatching old videos of shared moments or looking at old pictures—instead of persisting through the boredom. Often, I find that I only remember pictures of my life instead of my first-hand experience of it.
Why does this matter? Individual memory is unreliable. So is communal memory: every time a story is told, it’s altered slightly. Even if the photos we share bend our memory a little, isn’t it better that we have more accurate representations of our lives?
Maybe. But I’m alarmed by the ease and alacrity with which we can and do turn to our cameras. Jacques Derrida, in his seminal lecture Archive Fever, claims that the process of archiving “produces as much as it records an event.”¹ What he means is that the methods we have of preserving the past necessarily constrain our perception of it. While Derrida is talking more about the material archive, the same can be said about our digital photos. Every time you snap a picture or take a video, you create the past. You shuck off other details of your surroundings in favor of the few you want to focus your attention on—details that, due to the limits of technology, are only visible and audible.
While audiovisual constraints make our experiences easier to share (my close friends and I have a routine of sending each other photo dumps to stay up to date on each other’s lives), an over-reliance on a camera can start to shape the way we experience the world. We begin to think in terms of photo-ops. We interact in sound bites. Increasingly, experience becomes a spectacle—a display of light and sound instead of something to touch or feel. We are mute onlookers of our own lives.
I am advocating for a different relationship to photos: pictures are a creative activity and should be treated as such. They are a representation of something, not the thing itself. If you take pictures because you want to accurately document everything you experience, you might be living a virtual life. But if a picture is a composition of lines and colors and angles that communicate a larger experience, if a picture is only a horizon, a flurry of emotions and events coming to bear on an instant—then you may be living.
Our impulse to capture is the same as the impulse we have to name things. It’s the same as our desire to write poems or compose songs or paint pictures. Pictures, therefore, as much as any other creative medium, deserve our prudence. With our phones, just as with a pen or with a brush, we’re offered the ability to augment our powers of communication and memory, to exercise a degree of control over what we do or don’t forget. With every use, we remove ourselves slightly from the present moment and step into history. But as much as we might wish to keep our experiences with us forever, and as much as cameras give us the illusion of being able to do so, we can’t.
On the plane, we were soaring above a thick canopy of clouds. They looked a lot like a strange neighborhood to me, at times rising to a citadel-like height above the bottom layer. I looked at the girl in front of me again, snapped a picture, and sat back, watching the billowing whites and greys roll by. The engine hum made the sky feel quiet. There were shades of vapor in those clouds I don’t know how to name.
¹ Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16.