In today’s day and age, the argument of “it only happened if there was a photo taken” is significant, as photos, for a long time, have been the primal devices in recording events, both on global and personal scales. When I take a photo, it is, more or less, to remember an event at a later date. It may be of a person or an insignificant item that will evoke an emotion when seeing it again.
It is hard to grasp that, not only were the earliest cameras room sized, but the images had to be manually traced, as Officeworks had not yet opened their stores.
Today’s day and age, everyone is able to access a camera. With almost every phone coming equipped with one in-built, people are able to take a photo within seconds, of anyone or anything. My grandparents cherish photos of their youth, having only a couple of photos, if that, of their childhood that they are able to base their memories on, a notion that not many people in our generation can not begin to fathom or relate to.
Future generations will never have this problem, as it seems that every miniscule movement a new person makes, from the second they are born, is captured by their eagerly awaiting parents who seem to be forgetting their other duties and just waiting by their new child’s crib, anticipating a smile, a yawn, a blink or the lift of a finger. Social media such as Facebook and Instagram allow people to show off the places they have been and the people they have been with more and more frequently. Speaking from personal experience, the reason I upload photos on this medium, is either because I think I look pretty darn good (how narcissistic of me), to show off people such as friends and family that mean something to me or places I have been that I think, for some absurd reason, people would be interested in.
It is funny that one of the first things someone says when you return from a holiday or have an event is, “Oh, can I see a photo”, and I think it is because it is the easiest way for someone to experience your experience, rather than try visualizing it based on words. Communication on a whole has become more advanced as a result.
Today, you can almost guarantee that the person on the train smiling or pulling a funny face at their phone is taking a selfie (self-portrait that has become infamous among youth and, sadly, is slowly creeping into the daily lives of the older generations- mum, stop, please), or the person sitting at a café taking a photo of their smashed avocado with scrambled eggs, and coffee cup positioned with the business label facing towards them is going to be uploading it on instagram with a hash tag something along the lines of #foodporn #bestmeal #hangovercure #nomnomnom. Is it frowned upon? Yes. But it has become part of everyday society, with celebrities who usually keep their private lives private also jumping on the bandwagon and inviting us all in to peek into and their daily lives- in turn, causing covetous rage and envy. Will I stop? No. Because at the risk of me one day developing a neurological disorder such as dementia, I know I will have almost 100,000 photos to look back at, knowing that one day, they had some sort of meaning behind them.