Tyranny of the Lens: Why we need to photograph less and experience more
In 1936, fleeing the German persecution of the Jews and the threat of World War II, the Hungarian born photographer Andre Kertész decided to emigrate to the United States. The editors of Life rejected Kertész’s photographs because, they said, his images ‘spoke too much’; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
Its 2017. As I browse through my Facebook feed, amidst a smorgasbord of political posts and dog videos, I see yet another travel update: With 134 photographs from a weekend trip.
While I was certainly not expecting the pictures to be subversive or pensive, it perfectly illustrates what is wrong with travel today: It is crushed under the tyranny of the lens. We are increasingly becoming junkies who in the desire to create everlasting memories trade off our intimate travel moments to fetishize our travel experiences. In our desire to show the world so much, we see so little ourselves. Photography places on a high pedestal, the most fickle of our senses — Sight.
For thousands of years science philosophers have been impressed by how effectively the senses work together to enhance the salience of biologically meaningful events. We are only now beginning to understand through neurobiology how different senses interact and enhance perception.
The processing of complex visual stimuli is known to occur in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) of humans. The STS is also thought to play a role in the integration of multimodal sensory input. On investigation, it was found that STS neurons coding the sight of actions also integrated the sound of those actions. The sound of the action increased or decreased the visually evoked response for an equal number of neurons. Simply put, the senses interact with each other to create the heightened experience — the complete immersion of the senses when we travel.
In the age of the digital photograph accelerated by impatience, the preference of sight over the other senses is creating an epidemic of partial memories of travel. Just because we have n number of shots, we are spending far less time framing and capturing a moment. We are often too rushed to soak in the surroundings, absorb the stories, the peculiarities, history of the place, appreciate the moment and then click.
Travel photography is now akin to pornography. It should be akin to the dance of seduction, with ample time for foreplay. Photography which emerges from a violation of the other senses, is exactly like pornography — gives a superficial high but is deeply unsatisfying and meaningless in the end. As we push the other senses in the background, we significantly decrease our ability to provide meaning to our photos — because we strip them of their stories. Stories are fundamental to the creation of memories, because stories capture a shared history: of the place, which has been defined by the stories of its people, and the way we experience the place, our own intimate stories. As Barthes writes in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.
We are consistently denying the ripening of our travel. The unripened experience of the digital pornography we create, needs to find a worthy adversary in going back to the basics. To a time when travel was slow, and each photograph captured a world within it. The more worlds we create, the more worlds we will have to escape to, taking flights of fancy to become our feral, traveler selves again.
