John Butleron whether we should stop snapping and start living.
I bought my first digital stills camera a little while back and realised that our relationship with picture taking has shifted radically. When it comes to the common-or-garden holiday snap, time and technology have eroded all the problems. You don't squint through the viewfinder, corral the group into a tight space in front of the monument and demand that they call out the name of their favourite dairy product because you only have one exposure left. Everything has become easy. It's not a one-shot deal.
Now you hold the camera at arm's length, take 20 pictures in a row, review them all on the LCD screen and delete the ones you don't want.
Gratification is instant, but, as with all instant pleasure, it can leave you feeling somewhat empty. Before, there was anticipation at the pharmacy counter, watching the man in the white coat approaching with the folder of pictures. The currency of a photograph was so much more valuable then, because it reminded you of something that happened in the past, not the past 20 seconds.
For many years I never owned a camera. There are a number of reasons for this, most of which I'm slightly embarrassed to admit to. I used to feel that taking pictures would somehow prevent me from living life to its fullest. This is a valid argument if you need both hands to hang on to the smooth rock of the Eiger during an attempt to scale the south face without ropes or crampons, but I spent my youth sunbathing and drinking Fanta.
When I was younger I firmly believed that any form of nostalgia was useless, that it was to be held at bay until you were beyond contributing further to the story of your life, at which point you could replay every event in your mind. I now recognise this for the nonsense that it clearly is, and I have also learned that taking photographs is a way of participating in the ongoing story of your life, as well as recording it for posterity.
My sister and I took a kayaking trip through the Dordogne valley when we were 13 and 12 respectively. We were to cover 30km in a day, travelling downstream through canyons hewn from the rock, giving us spectacular views of the chateaux and the local wildlife. It was a photographer's dream, and when our parents dropped us off at the riverbank we could see one German couple nearby had brought a startling array of high-end lenses and cameras.
Somebody else saw it all. I just remember a minor fright on the kayak as we pushed off, a kind of listing to one side that I deftly corrected with my oar, sending us off into the stream, and the start of a wonderful day communing with nature. Halfway through the trip we took a picnic on a spit of land, and the German couple barked something at us as they whizzed past. After lunch we overtook them on a bend in the river, and they looked at us with murderous rage. I chalked all this hostility up to their intolerance of our youth and vigour.
The rest of the day passed without incident, and we dragged our boat ashore spent from the rowing but tanned and more alive than ever.
It was only when we got back to the campsite that the cause of the enmity was made clear. Back at the start of the river cruise I had capsized the German kayak with my oar,
sending thousands of pounds worth of photographic equipment overboard and into the murky deep. That winter their relatives must have wondered why they had been spared the endless albums documenting the summer holiday.
I recently stood behind a couple at the entrance to a tourist attraction in the west of Ireland, a couple who took 10 pictures of the map of the attraction they were about to visit. The queue snaked back behind them as he stood in front and she clicked, then she stood in front and he clicked, then they both stood in front and someone else clicked. Then a couple of clean shots of the map itself were taken, then some tighter shots of particular areas on the map. Then some wide shots, incorporating some of the wall the map was mounted on.
Standing in that queue, I remember thinking that this was where the younger me might have had a point after all. If you spend your holidays taking multiple pictures of you and whoever you're with in front of maps, isn't your holiday being negatively affected by the process of taking photos? With apology to the couple in question if the purpose of their holiday was to photograph maps, this might be the biggest drawback of digital photography.
Nobody has to make any choices these days, and as there is seemingly no limit to the amount of content we can create, why don't we just take a picture of everything? Yeah! Let's digitally capture everything, then when we're old we can recall how all we did when we were young was take pictures; how we never even looked at the Eiffel Tower, because we were busy framing it in an LCD screen to replicate a picture we could have bought on a postcard stand 20 metres away, for 50c.
Whenever I stand behind someone at a gig who is holding his phone in the air to record the show, I wonder when he's going to watch that, and whether the experience of watching it in low-resolution video on his phone beats the experience of watching the live event unfolding on the stage in front of him. What is this thing called "posterity", this malevolent force that demands we record everything? Shouldn't we just tell it to get lost?
John Butler blogs at http//lozenge.wordpress.com