The Forgotten Art of Taking Meaningful Pictures
Nov 11, 2022 2:55:01 GMT
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Post by Icebox on Nov 11, 2022 2:55:01 GMT
The other day I was scrolling through Facebook when I noticed that someone had posted a picture of our very first day of school, back in 1997.
That picture had probably spent the better part of two decades stored away in a dark closet and that's why it was so faded that I couldn't even make out the face of my First Grade teacher all the way at the back of the room. The rather dark tones of decoloration had "teamed up" with the overall darkness of an indoors, nineties picture taken from a painfully average camera to result in almost blurry, faded and nostalgic trip that we just don't see nowadays... and as if trying to underline that, the very next post I saw was a barrage of pictures from the current week, taken from an iPhone and with so many filters and effects that it wouldn't be out of place in a pretentious art gallery somewhere in Europe.
That got me thinking.
We seem to have lost the point of taking pictures.
Let me try to explain what I mean by it.
When I was a kid, taking pictures or recording video wasn't something one could do in a whim... no, it required a reason to go through the trouble and expense of getting the camera ready and even careful coordination with other parents (in the case of a school activity) or adults (in the case of a vacation). Every time the school put on a play or had an important event, my parents would spend the previous WEEK at the phone, trying to coordinate with others which things would be taped and pictured, because none of us could afford to videotape an entire school function and so we divided the work between those who would try to record as much of the function as possible and those who would picture us, the kids taking part on the fun. Then we would spend the night before getting ready for it, charging our camera with its wall plug (a super slow process) and then running to the century-old picture shop to get rolls and batteries for our other cameras.
The result was that we still have carefully-planned (but amateurishly-executed) pics and videos that we can check out with considerable difficulty but with the added "benefit" (and "flavor") of having the final products take on new forms as the passage of time gets to them, much like it got to us in front of the lenses. Being able to take one perfect picture after another and having them secure for as long as servers and internal memories survive just cheapens the whole experience and makes it feel replaceable, almost as if you would be sure to never look back on nearly any of the things you captured with your HD devises.
When this point was presented to me at first, I was quite skeptical, but now that I have seen quite a few of those old pictures and have compared them with what I photograph and record today... yeah, something's truly amiss here.
I'm not trying to bash you or the practice of taking an infinite array of pictures from your fingertips (far from it), but I think that, by making it something we can do whenever and for whatever reason we can come up with on the spot, we have definitely taken the "holy" status away from the once-sacred art of recording the most important moments of our lives.
That picture had probably spent the better part of two decades stored away in a dark closet and that's why it was so faded that I couldn't even make out the face of my First Grade teacher all the way at the back of the room. The rather dark tones of decoloration had "teamed up" with the overall darkness of an indoors, nineties picture taken from a painfully average camera to result in almost blurry, faded and nostalgic trip that we just don't see nowadays... and as if trying to underline that, the very next post I saw was a barrage of pictures from the current week, taken from an iPhone and with so many filters and effects that it wouldn't be out of place in a pretentious art gallery somewhere in Europe.
That got me thinking.
We seem to have lost the point of taking pictures.
Let me try to explain what I mean by it.
When I was a kid, taking pictures or recording video wasn't something one could do in a whim... no, it required a reason to go through the trouble and expense of getting the camera ready and even careful coordination with other parents (in the case of a school activity) or adults (in the case of a vacation). Every time the school put on a play or had an important event, my parents would spend the previous WEEK at the phone, trying to coordinate with others which things would be taped and pictured, because none of us could afford to videotape an entire school function and so we divided the work between those who would try to record as much of the function as possible and those who would picture us, the kids taking part on the fun. Then we would spend the night before getting ready for it, charging our camera with its wall plug (a super slow process) and then running to the century-old picture shop to get rolls and batteries for our other cameras.
The result was that we still have carefully-planned (but amateurishly-executed) pics and videos that we can check out with considerable difficulty but with the added "benefit" (and "flavor") of having the final products take on new forms as the passage of time gets to them, much like it got to us in front of the lenses. Being able to take one perfect picture after another and having them secure for as long as servers and internal memories survive just cheapens the whole experience and makes it feel replaceable, almost as if you would be sure to never look back on nearly any of the things you captured with your HD devises.
When this point was presented to me at first, I was quite skeptical, but now that I have seen quite a few of those old pictures and have compared them with what I photograph and record today... yeah, something's truly amiss here.
I'm not trying to bash you or the practice of taking an infinite array of pictures from your fingertips (far from it), but I think that, by making it something we can do whenever and for whatever reason we can come up with on the spot, we have definitely taken the "holy" status away from the once-sacred art of recording the most important moments of our lives.
I feel similarly about texting, posting, messaging, emailing or anything along that line 
... We used to have to write letters and post them (and keep them), but these days you can just drop an instant digital message that just cheapens the way people communicate. Most people don't give much thought to craft their messages anymore, or to have patience to wait weeks for a reply. Or they don't remember things previously discussed in person since it's easy to just confirm it over text. 
