A further thought occasioned by last week’s Tantrum, about posting photographs of your kids online. Over the weekend, I shot my usual dozens of photos of pure toddler adorableness. Last night, when my wife’s parents came by, I was showing a couple of them to my approving father-in-law. And he remarked, while chuckling, “This is the most photographed child since Prince Charles.”
Is he right? I’m not sure. I suspect, though, that many children born after the advent of the digital camera are photographed to a degree nobody would have imagined possible before. (Except maybe a professional photographer’s kids.) Banging off a couple of hundred frames in a day is not only far from unusual; it’s essentially effortless. Many of this weekend’s pictures came from a sunny-day visit to the Central Park Zoo, and I saw literally dozens of parents with their DSLRs, firing away nonstop. An onslaught of megapixels must have resulted from that one day, and every day like it.
I wonder how much of this documentation will survive. My own childhood image bank is contained in a few albums and a couple of shoeboxes, plus a neat little rack of Super 8 films. Later kids probably have a stack of camcorder tapes. Digital media are simultaneously easier to make and easier to discard, and obviously if a parent’s un-backed-up hard drive crashes—or he or she just isn’t archivally inclined—that’ll be that. But setting aside extreme losses like that (which are akin to a flood in the basement or fire in the attic destroying those shoeboxes and albums), I can’t help thinking that every kid born after 2000 will go through life with a gradually growing digital life bank, one that’ll eventually grow from photos and videos to school-related materials and eventually e-mails and Tweets and Facebook updates and whatever appears in that vein ten years from now. No wonder the Library of Congress wants to save all of it: It documents everyday life, just as, say, letters sent home used to. Everyone will grow up with a bigger and bigger hard drive full of one’s own life, and that Achilles’ heel—backing up—will be taken over by some version of cloud computing. It will all be accessible in an instant.
Which is good, because I am so sleep-deprived these days that my memory is going to hell.
There are a number of significant changes that have taken place courtesy of digital media. It appears to me that fewer pictures are actually printed than in the past.
You don’t have to take your 110, 126 or 35 mm in to a shop to see how the photos came out. There they are, right in front of you on the viewfinder. Maybe it is just me, but I find myself printing fewer and fewer.
Of course some of it can be attributed to now having 17 thousand photos so…
years ago (2001, actually) I was staying in Paris, France. I finally went to the Louvre when a friend visited us from abroad and wanted to go. We three, my friend, my husband and I, each went at our own pace through the exhibits, sometimes together and sometimes apart.
What struck me the most is the number of people seeing the works of Michelangelo and the likes strictly through their viewfinders. It really threw me for a loop! They could probably purchase video or photos of the works at far superior quality after eyeballing the stuff in person, but no.
WTF?
I purposefully leave the camera (also my phone) securely in my pocket so that I remember to live life live with my kids, viewing them strictly through our experiences as a result of the thoughts I had that day about photography and its place.
That said, I still have a gazillion and a half of all 3 of my kids. WTF?