I noticed recently that we've been slacking off bigtime in taking photographs of our kids and their events. I bet we'll come to regret that, but neither Julie nor I can stand to have to stand outside events in our family's life and record them on the video camera or with a still camera. It seems so artificial. In this beautiful essay about image and sacrament, Glenn Arbery reflects on pilgrimages to Catholic sites, and the experience of one of his daughters' recent weddings, to explore what's wrong with the modern obsession with recording experiences instead of participating in them. Excerpt:
What is it that puts me off about photographers? Anyone who's ever been in charge of taking pictures at a Thanksgiving dinner or a children's birthday party knows how abstracting it is. If you have to take the pictures, you can't be there in the usual sense: you have to be always looking for shots, turning people toward the camera, eyeing the turkey or birthday cake for posterity. But the more you believe in what you're doing, the more you also believe your presence justifies everything.The photographers I'm talking about, the true believers, don't seem absent from where they are, the way people do when their eyes pass over you as they talk on their cell phones. But as Nikon says on its website: "Choose a camera and you've taken the first step toward turning fleeting moments into precious memories." What it says is accurate: the objective of most amateur photography is the conquest of time and distance. The photographs will eventually be the memories as the context drops away. Just go through your old photographs and see.
The great faculty of memory that St. Augustine celebrates in the Confessions has enhanced itself with literal accuracy and indentured itself to technology at the same time. Plato (and not just Plato) worried that even writing things down would supplant the living presence of the truth, but the photograph uncannily holds the present, only the present, this moment forever, while the world goes on.
A veiled Muslim woman once chased my wife through Istanbul trying to get back her stolen image. I understand the impulse. I find myself uncomfortably in the camp of Susan Sontag: "the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood."
If somebody has a birthday party, and nobody photographs it, do we worry that it can't be said to have happened?
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I'm so glad you posted this. It put into form some notions I've had about this.
Pictures at truly special events, I don't mind. But birthday parties for adults? Dinner get-togethers? Part of my aversion to this is vanity - I was never photogenic to begin with and am less so now. But part is that I think that we should let memory do its mystical work.
As an aside, it's been my impression that the biggest photo-philes are women (video cameras probably skew male).
An older couple that I had been friends with for quite a while were planning a month long trip to rural parts of Mexico. I inanely asked them "Are you going to take a lot of pictures while you are there?" The woman replied, without missing a beat, "No, we are just going to look longer."
I took that message to heart...
Just think on this: Arch-angels, angelic choirs, shepherds, wise men, the birth of a Saviour. What a bunch of 'memories' and photo-opportunities!
How did Mary respond? She "...kept all these things and pondered them in her heart." (Luke 2.19)
We should be thankful that she didn't rely on the video camera instead. That would have been lost when they fled to Egypt, and our Scriptures might not have been the same!
Well said, Flash Nick.
I think Jeff makes a valid point.
I used to be an enthusiastic shutterbug myself, though I tapered off from it in my thirties. Now, as I have a 5-year-old, I take more pictures than I did, say, a decade ago. Nevertheless, I still am not as much into taking pictures as I once was.
I actually thought about this awhile back, reflecting on how much I had changed in this respect. What I came up with is something like this: In this media-saturated age in which we live, it has become, it seems, more important to recored than to experience. We come to regard special occasions (or everyday occassions, for that matter) not as things to be experienced in themselves, with all their beauty and their ephemeral nature, but as things to be photographed, taped, recorded, or otherwise frozen in the amber of electronic media. Amber, of course, kills the very insect it preserves; and I think something similar happens with recording media.
In other words, rather than fully enjoying and participating in the moment, we are angling for the perfect shot, or thinking "Gee, this'll make a good video," or some such. We want to capture the moment for the future, at the expense of actually living it in the present. As I move further into middle age, it is more important for me to experience the moment than to record what is, after all, but a small shard of it. I'd rather play with my daughter in the snow than take a picture of her playing in the snow. This doesn't mean I never snap a shot or take a video--I just feel freer to do it if I want to, and I have no illusions that I am really "preserving" a moment which cannot truly be preserved.
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