In one of my classes we are studying photography and personally I am not really impressed with what photography has become in recent years. It used to be such a novelty. You couldn’t just whip out your phone and snap 1,371 photos of your face looking the same each time with your tongue stuck out. No. In portrait photos people got dressed up nicely and posed. In any photography people wouldn’t carelessly aim and shoot. They would line up the shot to ensure an aesthetically pleasing image. They would be selective with their photography.

Nowadays people just take photos of their food to put on instagram or selfies in a night club. When was the last time you took a photo with your mum? With your grandparents? With your brother or sister? I know for one I rarely take these sorts of photos anymore.

Now that’s not really the problem I am having. I kind of segway-ed a bit. What I dislike about photography these days is not that it is digital, it’s that it stays digital. We never get photos printed anymore. We leave them on the SD card or upload them to our computer but that is where it ends. Then a computer might crash, a file might get lost, an SD card might become faulty. And all those memories are lost. This has happened to me. As soon as my family got a digital camera when I was about 8 or 9 years old photos just seemed to stop. I am sure there are thousands on an old laptop somewhere but no one will ever have the time to go buy a new charger, charge it up, look through all the files and find them.

This is a photograph my grandfather took of my grandmother in the late 50’s in Greece.