Perhaps you’ve seen the advertising for the new cellphones that have literally a cluster of cameras on the back. Pictures are crisper and cleaner, the colors are bolder and more lifelike. If you’re like me, I tend toward the “less is more” when it comes to pictures. Or maybe you’re one of those folks that take way, way more pictures that they need to.
I use the camera primarily to photograph my gardens and particularly striking container combinations. Her Ladyship can’t always get out to see some of my creations in obscure spots, so I can show her what I’ve been working on all morning. Just yesterday, I put the porch furniture away, rearranged and threw out some things that wouldn’t make it through the winter, and added a pumpkin or two. Ok, not the Van Gogh exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, but for me quite successful. I took some photos to show Herself as she retains veto power, although I’ve never known her to veto any crucial landscape decisions.
Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and others have opened up a whole new world of posting pictures that, from my humble perspective, shouldn’t have been taken in the first place. “This tree branch fell in my yard last night. There’s a cute squirrel sitting on it.” Ok. Not a hurricane coming through and hundreds without power. A branch down happens on a windy night. If it has artistic merit, perhaps, but even that’s a stretch. Squirrel on a branch? It’s hardly historic and worthy of preservation. I will say that children are cute to see on social media. In many cases, it’s an opportunity to see the ones we don’t or can’t get to see in person.
Our dear friend Lady Peacock, about whom I’ve written fairly extensively, came to visit a few weeks back, and she typically has some things on her phone to show us. Cute pictures of her granddaughter, some of her grandson in high school. We like to see those. However, as she admitted herself, she has close to 8,000 pictures on her phone, and a healthy percentage of them are food / meals that she’s had while in restaurants. She speculated the other day, “I probably should edit those.” Really? You think? I may have mentioned that she organizes “showings” of her travel pictures, last year her two weeks in Paris and London. Her Ladyship and I do enjoy seeing snaps of her travels. She tells us that she’s edited them. Our definitions of “edit” are vastly different. In my mind, edit means to take some (or most) out. The last time, we watched for a few hours – shots of her with the Eiffel Tower behind her, her standing next to her table at lunch, her standing next to or in front of a beautiful stained-glass window, her on a bridge over the Seine, etc., etc. You get the idea. You may have noticed the recurring theme. She’s in the healthy majority of them, which means that thousands of strangers have been pressed into service. Often with the commentary, “I don’t like my hair in this one.” Yes, the fire at Notre Dame in the background is a tragedy of historic proportion, but it’s nothing compared to Lady P’s hair blowing across her face. How is it that her photographic efforts expand into the hundreds upon hundreds, you may rightly ask? Well, for starters, the lunch image isn’t complete with just a shot of her standing next to a table, which was a sandwich or salad which is “one of the best she’s ever eaten”. (At least it’s one of the remarkably few that was not sent back.) That sandwich is apparently an architectural masterwork, and really needs to be photographed from all sides so the viewer gets the full effect. When we broke later for lunch on opening day of the viewing, I commented that it would be nice to see her pictures of London next. “Oh no,” says she. “That’s just the first two days in Paris.” As I may have mentioned previously, on a trip to England a few years back, officials at Canterbury Cathedral had the impertinence to put up scaffolding for exterior repairs, and thus Lady P’s photos were less than fully effective. I was half expecting to hear that she’d asked them to remove it briefly so she could take pictures of the cathedral in all its glory.
Every year in my experiences as a band and choir director, one of the very worst experiences was getting the marching band lined up for yearbook pictures. I will never know how this group can perform intricate field drills at the snap of a finger, but take seeming hours to line up for a yearbook picture. Of course, the photographer doesn’t help either. He or she is rearranging them by height and hair color, scrunching them in together, mixing and matching until I wanted to scream. It drove me mad. How they all look organized and professional in the yearbook I could never figure out.
Back to the nature of photos. And, I should add, videos. Many is the time I’d sit in the back of an auditorium watching students perform. Right in front of me are folks with tablets and phones, usually holding them up and blocking views for everyone behind them. Or, they’d actually be watching the concert on the small screen. Wait a minute, folks. Isn’t it better live and in person? Look at the stage, for heaven’s sake. That’s the whole idea. We now have to catch every breathing moment on film, whether it’s a life event or someone doing something really dumb. I do blame “America’s Funniest Videos” for that. It encourages not only over- recording but taping outside-the-box stupidity. Sometimes there’s a mattress for the landing, but it’s been placed just wide of where it needed to be. Or the ice on the pond was not quite as thick as the jumper thought. Speaking of videos, remember the good old days of “camcorders”? Families would be wandering around Disney World, cameras the size of a bazooka mounted on mom or dad’s shoulder, edging or outright pushing others out of the way so they could preserve every minute of the “magic”. If you sat behind them in the Hall of Presidents, you’d miss at least forty of them. The best part is that those people insisted on sitting right down front, so they could block everything. I’d see the show on their monitor, about the size of a large postage stamp.
Getting back to the fine art of photography. The interesting thing is that many folks think that the world is just as captivated by their pictures as they themselves are. I guess the phrase, “You really had to be there” never enters their consciousness. Pictures of somebody with their cat, often rescued from a tree or it wandered home bedraggled from three days in the woods, find themselves on the front page of the local newspaper. Or again, as I mentioned, “This branch fell onto my back porch. How truly remarkable is nature?” Cut it up and put in the fireplace. When your neighborhood goes up in flames, we’ll have a photo op for the paper.
Yes, indeed. We are the most photographed, recorded civilization in history, and we seem obsessed with looking at ourselves. Back in the old days – centuries, that is, a family would have painted portraits of themselves smiling benevolently down on future generations. That was the great-great-great grandfather, the fourth Earl of Upsome-Downside. Next to him is his wife, Charlotte, known in family history as Crazy Lottie, the one that would run around in her nightgown in the gardens at midnight. They found her floating in the pond, where what she thought was the bridge in fact wasn’t. That was it. In this day and age, we’d have hundreds of pictures of Lottie at every spot, every garden bench in the moonlight, perhaps even a mid-air shot of her final plunge.
From those portraits, we “evolved” to the posed family shots. I remember seeing some of my great-grandparents, taken at some photography shop. For some reason, those folks never smiled. Perhaps they were told not to smile, or they hadn’t ever practiced it. My great grandmother was seated in one of those Victorian armchairs, with my great grandfather standing behind her. Both looked like they were about to be taken into custody for some heinous crime. I also saw a picture – not sure where it is now – of my father at a very young age – perhaps five or six, with his aunts, uncles, and grand -parents. He was the only grandchild. They’re posed on the front lawn of the old family home, looking for all the world like visiting day at the sanitarium. Photography has certainly lightened up a bit in recent years. The paparazzi have given us the action shot. Usually someone running away or covering their face. Photography has come a long way from the box camera and the Brownie to the iPhone, with its multiple camera lenses. But have we used it wisely or just more? There are, of course professionals that give us marvelous, gallery-quality art photography. But left on our own, we’re taking literally millions of pictures not worth the chip space. And it seems we like to look at ourselves, and have others look at us, way too much.
So, all told, if Lady Peacock’s phone is anything to go by, to quote the old adage, “one picture is worth a thousand words”, her photographic content is somewhere north of the National Archives – sandwiches, salads, desserts, and all.
I'm Thinking...No! 