The Trident

Issue date: 5/10/06 Section: Distractions

There's an outdated expression that a picture is worth a thousand words. Outdated because in the 21st century pictures have become so ubiquitous that we too often allow volumes of pictures to speak for us rather than allow our pictures to speak volumes. The Point-and-Shoot Revolution has prevailed over the youth of America and our society will be markedly different from this point on. The internet, social networking databases, photoshop, digital cameras and cell phone cameras have changed the way people look at the world. Today people think with their eyes and in turn have come to trust them implicitly.

Cameras used to be somewhat of an agitation. There were lenses to focus, flash bulbs to change, film developing used to take days and the whole process would cost a fair amount of money. Up until around WWII, most Americans had but a handful of photographs. Advancements occurred over time making photographs a little bit easier and a little bit cheaper. However, once the digital age was ushered in, our relationship with the image was forever changed. A majority of people under the age of 25 own a digital camera. It's small enough to fit in a pocket or a purse. After the initial investment, it costs next to nothing to take, view and save your pictures. The ease of communication via the internet and our complete worship of the image as a culture has created a society of young adults and adolescents who have made the digital camera the pocket staple that a dime for a payphone call once was 30 years ago. Of course no one needs to use a payphone today, most everyone has a cell phone. And most of those cell phones can take pictures.

But it's not just the volume of pictures we take but rather the variety of pictures we take, or rather the lack thereof. If the world was to end tomorrow and a futuristic race was to uncover our photo albums, it is altogether likely that they might come to the following conclusions: You were close with everyone around you. You were almost always in grand or festive circumstances. You were always smiling. It is rare that we allow the camera to capture our full range of emotions, possibly because we do not want to be cognizant of our full range of emotions. We want to be reminded of our joy but never our pain. We are seldom photographed during quotidian activities. We rarely see real people displaying real emotions in the real world. It seems that people are conditioned to respond to the camera in some Pavlovian manner. The 20th century philosopher Roland Barthes commented, "From the moment I feel I am in the camera's eye, everything changes. I begin to pose, I immediately create a different body, I change even before the image."

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools