I was having breakfast a while ago with a good friend. We get together regularly for coffee or breakfast, just to catch up. I asked if he had any pictures of his granddaughters – his second happily arrived. He hadn’t yet, but promised that his son would put pictures on his phone for him. OK. His technical skills are right in line with mine. The princess has to download apps for me, or answer questions when this computer confronts me.
Social media 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, unless you’re a professional having a “showing”. 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. My niece and her husband, a very respectable couple, showed off the matching tattoos they got for an anniversary or some such. Not my idea of anniversary gifts, but then, I’m not much of a tattoo person. A nice houseplant would have done the job.
Our dear friend Lady Peacock, about whom I’ve written fairly extensively, came to visit a while ago, 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, literally, thousands of pictures on her phone, and a healthy percentage of them are food / meals that she’s had while in restaurants. Or pictures of her new male companion’s various houses. She speculated the other day, “I probably should edit those.” That’s not a bad idea. I may have mentioned that she organizes “showings” of her travel pictures, like her trips to Paris and London, or most recently to Ireland. Her Ladyship and I do enjoy seeing the ones of her travels. She tells us that she’s edited them down. Our definitions of “edit” are vastly different. In my mind, edit means to remove most of the duplicates. Her motto could be “A thousand pictures are worth a thousand words.” She is in a fair percentage of them, which means that many hapless strangers have been pressed into service. Often with the color commentary, “I don’t like my hair in this one.” Yes, the smoldering remains of Notre Dame Cathedral in the background is a tragedy of historic proportion, but it’s nothing compared to Lady P’s hair blowing across her face or her outfit was all wrong. 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 that ranked as “one of the best I’ve ever eaten”. (It didn’t go back to the kitchen for some reason, which is all to the good.) That sandwich is apparently an architectural masterwork, and really needs to be photographed from all sides so the viewer gets the full effect. Extravagant desserts are also a photo favorite. In fairness, she does take many really good pictures. We have one of her beach scenes hanging in our bedroom that we really liked.
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 what feels like 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 used to drove me mad. How they all look organized and reasonably professional in the yearbook I’ll never know.
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 major artillery 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 everyone up to Teddy Roosevelt. The best part is that those people insisted on sitting right down front, so they could block everything. I’d have to watch 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, 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?” Just cut up that poor tree and put it 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 Bottomly. Next to him is his wife, Lady Bottomly, known in family history as Crazy Lottie, the one that howled at the moon. Eventually, they found her floating in the pond, like an episode of Midsomer Murders, only accidental. In this day and age, we’d have dozens of pictures of Lottie mid-howl. From those portraits, we “evolved” to the posed family shots. I remember seeing some of my ancestors, 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. Great Aunt Elsie was front and center, and she did indeed end up in a “rest home”, and by the look on her face, her journey was well on its way. Picture-taking has certainly lightened up a bit in recent years. 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 the advent of the “selfie” has only made us more self-obsessed, if that’s possible.
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 – late lunches and all.
I'm Thinking...No! 