How do you
feel about photographs? Are you someone
who accepts that memory is ephemeral, or do you try to capture and catalogue
all of your experiences? Do you ever go
back and look at your old photos? How
would you feel if they were lost or destroyed?
First of all, I think photos are great. I only know 1 person that used to denounce any form of memory keeping. He was something of a “memory purist”, definitely “live in the moment” type of a guy. I think he has a point but is taking it a bit too far for my liking. I think people take pictures at special times but that has different meaning for each individual. I don’t “story” when I go to concerts although maybe 1 or 2 if it’s a festival. However when I’m abroad, I do take many pictures. I myself dislike only seeing phone screens at a concert, it just ruins the atmosphere for me. That just means that for me, concerts are not special but travelling abroad is. It depends really.
ReplyDeleteAnd in terms of looking back at photos, I learnt to love tracking my progress because of DofE and CAS but only rarely go back to look back but when I do, I usually start looking at other pictures and then realize I spent my whole afternoon looking through my pictures. So, in my opinion, it is not pointless to take pictures and then never intend to look at them, because it is those serendipitous moments of stumbling upon your old pictures that makes it worthwhile. A picture could be compared to a box of old toys, both have a memory attached to them. However, the main difference is that if I take too many photos from my skiing trip, the memory of the trip gets diluted and the photos lose value with every additional one I take. So, finding a unique film photo of my birthday has the same value as a skateboard from my weird phase. So, I will keep taking photos since my memory is terrible but maybe not as many.
I'm weird when it comes to photos. Sometimes, I'm a "living in the moment" sort of person. I don't understand people that feel the need to take photos and record videos of literally everything they do and take copious amounts of selfies. This especially applies to people at concerts that have their phones in the air, trying to record the performance. Not only are they obstructing the view of everyone behind them, but I seriously doubt they're ever going to re-watch that poorly recorded snippet of a concert.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I love photography as an art form. Whenever I have my camera with me, I try to capture the moment along with its mood and emotion. I feel like when I focus on this, instead of just taking countless snapshots of everything, I find it easier to enjoy the moment. In fact, it adds another dimension of connection to the moment and makes me feel even more immersed in it.
I do this because, just like the article describes, looking back through the photos after a few years is a powerful experience. You get to re-live the moment one more time. When I see an old photo of a particularly memorable experience, I can immediately recall how I felt at that given moment, and I can also reflect on how different everything was back then. It's like a visual and emotional time machine.
Michal,
DeleteI agree that some people just overdo it with the photos. My sister for example has over 30000 photos on her phone and she took them in less than a year. I believe that the more photos you have the less is their value. I do not like taking pictures, however, I want to capture some moments. I would not want to lose these photos, however I accidentally deleted the whole gallery in my phone and wasn’t too bummed about it.
You mentioned that when you visit a concert all you see are phones. I had a strange experience when we played at Café Scherz and almost everyone had their phone in their hands throughout our performance. After it ended I asked people if they could send us the videos but no one had any.
Most of the time, I do not take photos, nor record videos or try to develop any alternative memento. I could easily describe myself, borrowing Marek's words, as "living in the moment" type of person. This is natural to me and can also be considered a way of fighting against the “directed forgetting effect”, which I have long ago detected myself - if I have a note about something (as a reminder), I completely forget about it. For me, the point of making photos is either only to briefly capture the moment, so that I can later recall and imagine the full experience in my head, or to produce a picture which I will deliberately look up from time to time (maybe because of it being particularly special or having artistic merits), not only get reminded of it by chance.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the idea of almost or absolutely taking no photos at all has some special vibe in it too. One artist has taken this idea and brought it to a whole new level. During their concert, there was a painter painting on a canvas. At the end of the concert, the painting was finished and portrayed the painters impression of the atmosphere of the concert. However, to not allow it escape the time and place it represented, they painted it over with black and no one could see it again - paradoxically, I know of this concert because I have seen it on youtube. There was no point in taking photos there. The moment was so strong, you would remember it forever. Thus, what value have photos which we only look at by chance? Maybe they are of a situation which is of no importance to us and, thus, might render themselves unnecessary.
I agree with Ado in the idea that if the moment or experience is strong enough, you don’t need photographs, because you will remember the moment forever. Some moments you find more important than others, and those are the ones you will remember. But how do you know which moments you will find important in the future? Withy every new day and experience, we become a slightly different person than we were the day before, so there is no way of telling if an experience or moment we don’t find important now won’t be important to us in the future. Personally, my photographs aren’t organized at all, or at least less than I would like. This can be considered a bad thing, but then again there is also a sort of fun feeling to finding random pictures from the past in random folders by accident and taking a trip down memory lane and reflecting how you have grown and changed.
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