The Convenience of Creating Bullshit
Last Memorial Day, I attended the wedding of two very dear friends of mine. Then they went on a honeymoon, then life happened, and today I finally received an e-mail linking me to a shared photo album containing the wedding pictures. I clicked the link in order to relive some good memories from that special day. As the page loaded, I noticed the number of photos in the photo album at the upper left-hand corner of the webpage:
One-thousand and seven fucking pictures!
Am I supposed to quit my job and pore through this endless stream of photographs? And it wasn't just wedding-pertinent pics, but lots of ancillary photos that shouldn't have made the final cut: six photos of two old ladies dipping their feet in a pool. A dozen blurry photos of people rushing around, too busy to stop and pose. Countless indescribable pictures of indeterminate origin, depicting shadowy figures doing incredible things like eating barbecue. It was like the entire contents of someone's digital camera had been vomited onto my web browser. And, sucker that I am, I hung in there for roughly two-hundred pictures.
Ten years ago, having a thousand pictures from your wedding would have been unthinkable. They would have filled about twenty photo albums, stuffed to capacity. It would have cost a few thousand dollars. But those pictures would have all been gems; the rejects would never have seen the light of day. There would be some shots of the kids, some shots of the people in attendance, but mainly you would have seen the wedding ceremony and a slew of pics where the bride and groom stand in various formations, like one of those novelty photo booths at the carnival where you can pretend to be a Wild West outlaw. The pic of a guy helping some kid get lemonade from the cooler's liquid dispenser probably wouldn't have made the cut.
I love this newly-married couple very much, and I don't blame them for wanting to preserve as much as possible from their most important occasion. Their photo album belies one of the most disheartening aspects of the digital age, which is how disposable everything has become. So disposable, in fact, that you get what is basically someone's photographic trash dumped onto your computer for you to weed through. Who can be bothered? It's your problem now. I'm certainly not going to spend three to five hours looking through these flicks, so they get stored in a folder and zipped and are promptly forgotten about. It is likely that I will never look at them again. There are so many pictures attached to this event, that for all intents and purposes we may as well assume that there were no pictures at all. That suits me just fine; in my memory, I ended up at the bottom of a pile-on by all the bridesmaids in a shallow Jell-O wrestling pit.
I've got another friend who has a nice digital camera, and on any given outing she takes about a hundred pictures. Per hour. Pictures of wrought-iron gates, pictures of fading signage. Pictures of some guy standing around on the corner, thinking about his next move. Click, click, click. At the end of a day, she can spend about two hours looking over the set, discarding the boring, or the corny, or the just plain not visible photographs. At the end, she's left with about a dozen nice photographs, two or three of which will be really good. But, in the classic sense, she is not a photographer. She's more like a photographic gambler, throwing the dice often enough to increase her chances of framing a shot that is worthwhile. What you get is a kind of incidental Tourette's Syndrome, a spasmatic clicking of the aperture until something meaningful happens. In the final analysis, you have to wonder whether she actually attended the excursion in question, or if she just documented it for later review. She can experience the beautiful day later, when it is raining outside.
One-thousand and seven fucking pictures!
Am I supposed to quit my job and pore through this endless stream of photographs? And it wasn't just wedding-pertinent pics, but lots of ancillary photos that shouldn't have made the final cut: six photos of two old ladies dipping their feet in a pool. A dozen blurry photos of people rushing around, too busy to stop and pose. Countless indescribable pictures of indeterminate origin, depicting shadowy figures doing incredible things like eating barbecue. It was like the entire contents of someone's digital camera had been vomited onto my web browser. And, sucker that I am, I hung in there for roughly two-hundred pictures.
Ten years ago, having a thousand pictures from your wedding would have been unthinkable. They would have filled about twenty photo albums, stuffed to capacity. It would have cost a few thousand dollars. But those pictures would have all been gems; the rejects would never have seen the light of day. There would be some shots of the kids, some shots of the people in attendance, but mainly you would have seen the wedding ceremony and a slew of pics where the bride and groom stand in various formations, like one of those novelty photo booths at the carnival where you can pretend to be a Wild West outlaw. The pic of a guy helping some kid get lemonade from the cooler's liquid dispenser probably wouldn't have made the cut.
I love this newly-married couple very much, and I don't blame them for wanting to preserve as much as possible from their most important occasion. Their photo album belies one of the most disheartening aspects of the digital age, which is how disposable everything has become. So disposable, in fact, that you get what is basically someone's photographic trash dumped onto your computer for you to weed through. Who can be bothered? It's your problem now. I'm certainly not going to spend three to five hours looking through these flicks, so they get stored in a folder and zipped and are promptly forgotten about. It is likely that I will never look at them again. There are so many pictures attached to this event, that for all intents and purposes we may as well assume that there were no pictures at all. That suits me just fine; in my memory, I ended up at the bottom of a pile-on by all the bridesmaids in a shallow Jell-O wrestling pit.
I've got another friend who has a nice digital camera, and on any given outing she takes about a hundred pictures. Per hour. Pictures of wrought-iron gates, pictures of fading signage. Pictures of some guy standing around on the corner, thinking about his next move. Click, click, click. At the end of a day, she can spend about two hours looking over the set, discarding the boring, or the corny, or the just plain not visible photographs. At the end, she's left with about a dozen nice photographs, two or three of which will be really good. But, in the classic sense, she is not a photographer. She's more like a photographic gambler, throwing the dice often enough to increase her chances of framing a shot that is worthwhile. What you get is a kind of incidental Tourette's Syndrome, a spasmatic clicking of the aperture until something meaningful happens. In the final analysis, you have to wonder whether she actually attended the excursion in question, or if she just documented it for later review. She can experience the beautiful day later, when it is raining outside.
posted by Reggie Hemingway at
2:27 PM
1 Comments:
Now hol' up a minute.
How is taking lots of photographs, and then editing them down to just the gems, not photography "in the classic sense?"
Sounds just like what you write the wedding photographer would have done 10 years ago: "But those pictures would have all been gems; the rejects would never have seen the light of day"
Same 'ting, that, it's just that digital tech makes it way quicker and cheaper to shoot & edit in a fashion that only the rich (or professionals) would have been able to do in the past.
Saying "She's more like a photographic gambler, throwing the dice often enough to increase her chances of framing a shot that is worthwhile" is just what any pro-photographer (including yr. example of the 80's film-using folks) that has enough $$ to shoot till he/she gets what she wants does, and has always done since photo-roll-based photography came to prominence in the early 20th century.
Unless you are thinking of "classic" photography narrowly in the 19th century (or Ansell Adams) sense of someone toting an enormous view camera (you know, the ones where the camera has a big bellows-lens and the photographer has to hide under a hood)then your prejudice against lots of shooting seems unfounded or misinformed.
You start off by arguing that the digital age has made it so easy to document every second that it has lessened the value of photographs is contradicted by your argument that someone that takes advantage of digital photography's ability to eliminate cost as a factor in shooting, and that takes the trouble to edit 100's of photos down to a few gems is suffering from mental illness, or is gambling.
The philosophical argument that someone that views the world primarily through a camera, trying to preserve things for posterity misses out on the "now" is a valid and well-precedented view. However, looking and forgetting may not be preferable either.
Just sayin'.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home