This is a photo I took years ago. It’s probably one of my favourite photos. I went through a phase where I experimented with film photography. Taking pictures with old cameras, developing the film, and doing interesting and sometimes odd things with them. This is a favourite of mine not because of the technique used, or the process, or the thought, but who is in it. It’s my mum and my little sister. On a dry summer day, my mum decided to sit on our front door steps. This was not like her. I had a few shots left of an old expired Ilford 35mm roll. So, I took this.
To you though, it’s probably not that great of a shot. The only thing that makes it remotely interesting is the subject matter, and they mean very little to you. For me though, it’s a different story. I feel a sense of belonging. It as though someone captured the souls of two people that mean a great deal to me, and froze them in time. I am able to relive that sunny day every time I look it. Reflect on a singular moment, pause a second and in come gushing all the feelings, anxieties of that stage in my life.
Remembrance, can sometimes be a function of photography. For Barthes, photography’s power lies in its ability to force us to think. Its power is its ability to reject today social constraints and structures. Bring forth a kind of peculiarity, a quaint presence, prescience even. Something that you miss dearly. Here you are, in the future, looking all the way back, placing your gaze firmly on the things that mattered. You’re the insect on the wall. Searching. Across an empty and vast plane named time.
If you were born before the year 2000, I promise there’s a physical album of your childhood your parents stashed away. It’s filled with photos from birthday parties, extended family coming to visit, cheeky little trips here and there. You probably also remember family members saying they’ve got to run to Boots or the petrol station because they ‘’ran out of film’. For most people, taking photos was a thing that you did with actual attention. It required planning. You set out to capture memories. Two notable things have changed in personal photography.
The first is that photos can now be taken by every single phone on the market. Even the cheapest phones have camera (albeit a bit shitty). The planning required to “record” a memory is no longer necessary. This has the knock-on effect that you’re less likely to take photos for the purposes of recording stuff. That option is always there, and therefore…constantly recording stuff becomes a futile task. Why take another picture of your mum when you already have a thousand pictures of her? Or when you’ll always have the ability to take pictures, at any moment.
The second is how photography is shared. And this, for me, is perhaps the more significant. There’s a scene in Fincher’s the Social Network where Justin Timberlake’s character (Sean Parker) tells Jesse Eisenberg (who plays Mark Zuckerberg) that social events will be changed forever by Facebook. ‘it is the true digitization of life’, he says. ‘You don’t just go to a party anymore, you go to a party with a digital camera’. He’s right. And it’s true. Digital cameras boomed in popularity around the same time as the social media explosion. And people couldn’t get enough of taking photos in public places. You’d go to a social event, say a party, go home, and then the following morning you’d get a bunch of notifications. You have been tagged in x photos. The private life would now be recorded and presented to all your acquaintances now. So, private life was a public performance under the guise of a private life.
Seeing yourself in photos is not unlike hearing your own voice. There’s a certain creepiness to it. The mirror stage for the grown-up. You see yourself and not as you you, but as an object. Different to you but you at the same time. You become even more aware of your own status as an other. There’s a performance. There’s a wilful acceptance to be turned into a text, that can be read a thousand different ways, by different types of people who are all governed by their own little predilections. Private photos are no longer just being taken for private consumption and to remember. We are now posing in photos with no knowledge of when and who would consume them. Difficult to discern what is just a performance and what isn’t. Not unlike Debord’s “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation”.
You’d be completely missing the point though if you thought that sharing photos online has made them somehow less authentic. Taking photos has always been performative. Predicated on social conventions and what was accepted. Reflect a moment on the key differences between the ways in which photos are shared on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat. Instagram seems to be a purely curated space. Twitter, people share selfies and often short videos of themselves signing along to songs. Facebook’s photos seem to be about social events and us with other people. In all of these places though, we’re trying to present our best foot forward, and that usually requires different techniques and aesthetics.
The aesthetic requirements on these social networks don’t just appear overnight. They’re developed over many years in small communities that reward each other with likes and counter-likes. Pretexts are invented to normalize the sharing of private photos, and the entire thing is made to appear as though is part of a grander culture, much bigger than the individual sharing their photo. These pretexts aren’t too different from the weddings, and the parties that you parents went to in the 80s and 90s to take photos. It’s just that now, we’re living on another plane.
