Photographic Memories
Why I stopped letting the camera author my life
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“If you are depressed, you are living in the past.
If you are anxious, you are living in the future.
If you are at peace, you are living in the present.”
― Lao Tzu
If you scroll back in your email, my last MONOLOGUE entry left off on the evening that LeBron James became the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. On Tuesday, February 7th, LeBron sank his 38,390th basket to surpass Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s previous record. Of all the coverage, one photograph dominated the feeds and even if you don’t pay attention to sports, you probably caught it.
The picture, documented by Andrew D. Bernstein, gained just as much notoriety for the thousands of spectators in the crowd as it did the super athlete in the foreground on the fade-away. Almost every person in the arena (except for an amused Phil Knight, poised like a marble statue) has a smartphone in front of their face to capture the play. The image wasn’t surprising, but it was convicting of our nature. We’d much rather observe a representation of an event, framed in a rectangle, and translated into millions of pixels, than appreciate it directly with our eyes.
Social media quickly compared the spectators in the LeBron shot to the fans in a Michael Jordan championship photograph from decades ago. In the Jordan photo, fans are banging free-throw-distraction balloons, clutching their mouths, or howling. But not a single person has a camera out. In fact, back then, cameras and recording devices were only allowed in venues if you were with the press. There are only a few people on the floor filming the game for live television. Otherwise, everyone is engaged.
Like you, I shoot a lot of photos on my phone. I take a picture of the chilaquiles burrito I’m eating for lunch at Los Dos Chingones. I photograph my son as he makes a goofy face. I make sure to document which floor I parked at in the mall parking garage with my boomer head ass. Not a day goes by where I don’t shoot something. When smartphones first introduced a quality camera, I told myself that I’d develop some of the better pictures and frame them on my wall (I don’t think I’ve ever done this). Instead, my device continues to amass a library of random digital memory scraps, like a documentary of my life told through a mishmash of incoherent particles. And every couple of years, I pull tens of thousands of photos off the cloud and transfer them to hard drives. I’ve been doing this for over a decade and still don’t know exactly why. Is the MoMA going to invite me to do a phone-photo retrospective of my life when I’m 100 years old?
Why do we insist to photograph every waking moment? It’s not that we think that the camera’s flat perspective adds better texture to the event. For most of us, we’re conditioned to raising that phone up to LeBron, a glorious sunset, to clinking wine glasses to collect the memory. To prove we were there. To brag about it to our friends. Or just in case we might need it one day for… something. Furthermore, the action of snapshotting has become part of the lived experience. You are now actively in control of the moment. You are involved in narrating the story. This isn’t an objective understanding of the world. This is my personal point of view. This is how I make sense of the chaos as the main character of my life.
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge — and, therefore, like power.”
- Susan Sontag
When I turned 12, I hijacked my dad’s SLR camera, a Nikon 8008s, to shoot my friends skateboarding and jumping BMX bikes (Yes, we shot film back then. No, it wasn’t to be ironic. Yes, I told you I’m old). In the 1990s, most everybody had a camera, but they weren’t photographers. Film was expensive and so was processing, so casual picture-taking was reserved for milestone events and celebrations. Only hobbyist shutterbugs like me lugged a camera around to chronicle the more mundane moments.
Since most people didn’t shoot photos regularly, you could build an entire identity around being a photographer, like you would as an artist or a writer. Friends asked me to shoot their senior photos or memorialize the late-night antics at a birthday party. I shot live punk shows and once I started traveling, I photographed ancient architecture in Europe, the crocodiles in Costa Rica, profiles of personalities I’d interview. In fact, I got paid decent money to shoot for magazines. I have shoeboxes and crates of these slides and prints from my teenage and college years. Now, with the advent of the camera phone, I shoot as many photos in an hour as I would in a month back then. I have stacks of hard drives full of pix on my desk. The stupidest part is that I will never flip through most of these images. Even on the rare occasion I want to pull up an old memory, it takes me hours to find it, if I ever do (I usually lose interest).
The nuanced difference, of course, is that actively shooting film in the ‘90s was more of a thoughtful artistic expression vs. smartphone photography, which is more about cataloging personal history and the sensation of the snare. There are two problems with this. One, photography isn’t the most truthful telling of what’s transpired. Two, nonstop recording is detaching us further from the honest present and arguably driving us deeper into depression.
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