Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.
~Aaron Siskind
*30,000 seconds* View from the Window at Le Gras ~Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
Photographs are created with the future in mind. They are one of the few things that never matters in the moment, never serves any purpose, but are still often taken. They are used for memories, so the image will not fade in your mind as the years move on. Or, as social media has exploded as a popular tool, they are for others, so they can know what is happening in your life. So they can know how much fun you are having, and envy you. Or, so they can simply obtain a glimpse into your life, and know what you are doing even when you are far away and never talk to them. They are a connection.
They are the truth. The moment as you see it, completely unexaggerated, as events often are when stories are told. It is true that filters may distort an image, but the basic outlines and construct of the image will hold true.
They are a lie. I smile when I do not want to, pretend to laugh, put my arms around someone I barely know. They are a highlight reel, each one strategically placed in a magazine or on the internet. They are touched and retouched within an inch of their life.
The oldest photo that still exists is the view from a window. It took eight hours of exposure, an average full day at work, and the quality is terrible. The view could be considered, at best, a faint blur of a memory for anyone who witnessed it.
*600 seconds* Boulevard du Temple ~Daguerre
The first known picture ever taken including a human looks out a window at a busy street, where a man in the distance receives a shoe shine. Due to the long exposure time needed to take a picture, the street looks deserted. That man was the only person remaining stationary for long enough to be captured by the camera. He is real, but his surroundings are a lie, leaving him on a silent street in a ghost town.
The process to take a picture was still a rudimentary one at the time this photo was taken. Images were photographed onto a silver-surface plate. This plate formed a coating of silver iodide when it reacted with the iodine vapor it had been fumed with. After experimenting with different exposure times, Daguerre made the discovery that a shorter exposure time could later be enhanced to full visibility using mercury fumes. Photographs were becoming less of a nuisance to capture, and slightly more accessible.
*10 seconds* ~Un Vétéran et sa Femme
It is a concept that everyone has considered: The idea of photos controlling your life. When your friend yells at you to wait while she takes a picture of an average view, or you live the concert through your phone screen, you are falling subject to placing memory higher than experience on your importance scale.
Daniel Kahneman, a distinguished psychologist, claims that we actually are composed of two different selves, including the remembering self and the experiencing self. While these two parts to a whole would seem to strive for the same joys and triumphs in life, Kahneman contends that they want contrasting things. Asking a person how happy they are with their life up until now has a weak correlation with how happy their experiencing self currently is: The memory does not match their current state of being. In one study, two people underwent a painful operation. One spent less time on the table, but ended the operation in a state of more pain, and therefore remembered the experience as worse than the second person. In reality, this second person had a longer and more painful experience, but finished surgery in less pain than the first. Taking a photo is comparable to the first person, who has a more vivid memory, but less of the experience, while not taking a photo is more similar to the second person, who had more of the experience but a faded memory. The problem arises when the experience is all but wiped out by the constant need for pictures instead of living in the moment.
Un veteran et sa femme is a 1850s portrait of a civil war soldier and his wife. The world was shifting dramatically, and for a moderate sum of money and 10 seconds of their time, this couple was able to capture a memory.
*40,000ths of a second* ~Horse in Motion
People used to only take pictures of the important moments in life. They had to carefully choose what was worth taking a picture of, because of the cost and difficulties in obtaining a camera and developing pictures. The common choice was babies, which were the stars of 55% of pictures taken in 1960. It is understandable, when given all of the moments in life to choose from, that taking a picture of your child at a time in their life that they will not remember is as essential as a personal photograph can get.
Photos have other meaningful uses besides simply capturing a memory. They transport people to locations they could never dream of going, or help someone understand the troubles and wonders on opposite sides of the world. They elicit a reaction, whether it be a laugh at an amusing expression, or anger at a terrain ravaged by war. They are universal in what people can physically see, but incredibly individual in how they feel. As I have said before, photos are a mechanism used to transport memories through time, and even if the photo is not your own, it will bring forth a memory that no one else can truly understand.
Answering questions is another viable reason to capture an image. The human eye, while extraordinary in so many ways, does not have the ability to see overly quick occurrences. This is why in 1878, when Leland Stanford decided to answer the question of if a horse ever has all four hooves off of the ground while it is galloping, he hired a photographer to discover the answer. This photographer used large glass-plate cameras along the perimeter of the track, connected to wires the horse would trip which would cause the shutter to go off. After copying the silhouettes of these images onto a viewable disc, there were clear frames of the horse with all four hooves off of the ground. At 25 images in one second, the ability to take photos had now surpassed the capabilities of the human eye.
*10 millionths of a second* ~Wes Fesler Kicking a Football
In 2012, people took as many photos every two minutes as everyone in the world took collectively in the 1800s. I can only imagine that as the iPhone has risen in popularity this number has decreased to seconds. As photos have become easier to take, with cameras included in pocket sized devices, the amount of photos taken has increased dramatically. This is not a surprising result, but it is worrisome. If there arrives a point where humans can take a photo with the blink of an eye or the twitch of a finger, will they start living more through their memories than their experiences?
When students walk around a museum and are told to look at some paintings and photograph others, they later remember the images they did not photograph much more clearly. They pass off the burden of remembering to the camera, and use that image to bolster their later stories to friends. The camera may in fact not even improve a memory you have, but a memory you think you have. A memory you were physically present during, but not psychologically so.
There are many photographs of my childhood I truly believe I remember having taken, but I was too young to plausibly remember. This brings to light the deceiving nature of the photo, and how it can easily convince you to believe in the impossible.
*100 millionths of a second* ~Trinity Event
While baby photos continue to be an important part of life to document, pictures of plants and food and buildings are also unremarkable to see in today’s society. This is due to the sheer volume of photos in the world and on the internet these days.
In 2011, Facebook was the largest photo library in existence, with an estimated 3.5 trillion photos. This is 10,000 times larger than the amount contained in the Library of Congress. Today the numbers must be too high to estimate.
In 1945, before photos were especially popular, people already had the ability to record the effects of an atomic test by using a shutter with magnetic fields rather than mechanical parts. The photos were not created for fond memories, but strict documentation. Memory is preferable to experience in instances like this, where there needs to be some sort of memory so future generations understand the generations made in previous ones, but no one in the picture wants to carry the memories of their mistakes. Memory can be better than experience.
*2 trillionths of a second* ~Light in Motion
When I was little, I refused to take pictures, saying my memory would serve me better than a piece of paper ever could in the future. My parents complain that there is a large gap in my childhood because of the lack of pictures. But there is no gap. I remember it almost as well as I would with pictures, and I remember it without the nuisance of stopping my swim time on the beach to throw on a smile and stand too still.
When the blizzard hit this past week, and the streets were empty and beautiful as the snow fell, I had to pause several times when I started to pull out my phone to take a picture, and ask myself…
Uninterrupted wonder without photos, or a vivid memory to share with them?
Does experience dictate your life?
Or does memory?
~Aaron Siskind
*30,000 seconds* View from the Window at Le Gras ~Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
Photographs are created with the future in mind. They are one of the few things that never matters in the moment, never serves any purpose, but are still often taken. They are used for memories, so the image will not fade in your mind as the years move on. Or, as social media has exploded as a popular tool, they are for others, so they can know what is happening in your life. So they can know how much fun you are having, and envy you. Or, so they can simply obtain a glimpse into your life, and know what you are doing even when you are far away and never talk to them. They are a connection.
They are the truth. The moment as you see it, completely unexaggerated, as events often are when stories are told. It is true that filters may distort an image, but the basic outlines and construct of the image will hold true.
They are a lie. I smile when I do not want to, pretend to laugh, put my arms around someone I barely know. They are a highlight reel, each one strategically placed in a magazine or on the internet. They are touched and retouched within an inch of their life.
The oldest photo that still exists is the view from a window. It took eight hours of exposure, an average full day at work, and the quality is terrible. The view could be considered, at best, a faint blur of a memory for anyone who witnessed it.
*600 seconds* Boulevard du Temple ~Daguerre
The first known picture ever taken including a human looks out a window at a busy street, where a man in the distance receives a shoe shine. Due to the long exposure time needed to take a picture, the street looks deserted. That man was the only person remaining stationary for long enough to be captured by the camera. He is real, but his surroundings are a lie, leaving him on a silent street in a ghost town.
The process to take a picture was still a rudimentary one at the time this photo was taken. Images were photographed onto a silver-surface plate. This plate formed a coating of silver iodide when it reacted with the iodine vapor it had been fumed with. After experimenting with different exposure times, Daguerre made the discovery that a shorter exposure time could later be enhanced to full visibility using mercury fumes. Photographs were becoming less of a nuisance to capture, and slightly more accessible.
*10 seconds* ~Un Vétéran et sa Femme
It is a concept that everyone has considered: The idea of photos controlling your life. When your friend yells at you to wait while she takes a picture of an average view, or you live the concert through your phone screen, you are falling subject to placing memory higher than experience on your importance scale.
Daniel Kahneman, a distinguished psychologist, claims that we actually are composed of two different selves, including the remembering self and the experiencing self. While these two parts to a whole would seem to strive for the same joys and triumphs in life, Kahneman contends that they want contrasting things. Asking a person how happy they are with their life up until now has a weak correlation with how happy their experiencing self currently is: The memory does not match their current state of being. In one study, two people underwent a painful operation. One spent less time on the table, but ended the operation in a state of more pain, and therefore remembered the experience as worse than the second person. In reality, this second person had a longer and more painful experience, but finished surgery in less pain than the first. Taking a photo is comparable to the first person, who has a more vivid memory, but less of the experience, while not taking a photo is more similar to the second person, who had more of the experience but a faded memory. The problem arises when the experience is all but wiped out by the constant need for pictures instead of living in the moment.
Un veteran et sa femme is a 1850s portrait of a civil war soldier and his wife. The world was shifting dramatically, and for a moderate sum of money and 10 seconds of their time, this couple was able to capture a memory.
*40,000ths of a second* ~Horse in Motion
People used to only take pictures of the important moments in life. They had to carefully choose what was worth taking a picture of, because of the cost and difficulties in obtaining a camera and developing pictures. The common choice was babies, which were the stars of 55% of pictures taken in 1960. It is understandable, when given all of the moments in life to choose from, that taking a picture of your child at a time in their life that they will not remember is as essential as a personal photograph can get.
Photos have other meaningful uses besides simply capturing a memory. They transport people to locations they could never dream of going, or help someone understand the troubles and wonders on opposite sides of the world. They elicit a reaction, whether it be a laugh at an amusing expression, or anger at a terrain ravaged by war. They are universal in what people can physically see, but incredibly individual in how they feel. As I have said before, photos are a mechanism used to transport memories through time, and even if the photo is not your own, it will bring forth a memory that no one else can truly understand.
Answering questions is another viable reason to capture an image. The human eye, while extraordinary in so many ways, does not have the ability to see overly quick occurrences. This is why in 1878, when Leland Stanford decided to answer the question of if a horse ever has all four hooves off of the ground while it is galloping, he hired a photographer to discover the answer. This photographer used large glass-plate cameras along the perimeter of the track, connected to wires the horse would trip which would cause the shutter to go off. After copying the silhouettes of these images onto a viewable disc, there were clear frames of the horse with all four hooves off of the ground. At 25 images in one second, the ability to take photos had now surpassed the capabilities of the human eye.
*10 millionths of a second* ~Wes Fesler Kicking a Football
In 2012, people took as many photos every two minutes as everyone in the world took collectively in the 1800s. I can only imagine that as the iPhone has risen in popularity this number has decreased to seconds. As photos have become easier to take, with cameras included in pocket sized devices, the amount of photos taken has increased dramatically. This is not a surprising result, but it is worrisome. If there arrives a point where humans can take a photo with the blink of an eye or the twitch of a finger, will they start living more through their memories than their experiences?
When students walk around a museum and are told to look at some paintings and photograph others, they later remember the images they did not photograph much more clearly. They pass off the burden of remembering to the camera, and use that image to bolster their later stories to friends. The camera may in fact not even improve a memory you have, but a memory you think you have. A memory you were physically present during, but not psychologically so.
There are many photographs of my childhood I truly believe I remember having taken, but I was too young to plausibly remember. This brings to light the deceiving nature of the photo, and how it can easily convince you to believe in the impossible.
*100 millionths of a second* ~Trinity Event
While baby photos continue to be an important part of life to document, pictures of plants and food and buildings are also unremarkable to see in today’s society. This is due to the sheer volume of photos in the world and on the internet these days.
In 2011, Facebook was the largest photo library in existence, with an estimated 3.5 trillion photos. This is 10,000 times larger than the amount contained in the Library of Congress. Today the numbers must be too high to estimate.
In 1945, before photos were especially popular, people already had the ability to record the effects of an atomic test by using a shutter with magnetic fields rather than mechanical parts. The photos were not created for fond memories, but strict documentation. Memory is preferable to experience in instances like this, where there needs to be some sort of memory so future generations understand the generations made in previous ones, but no one in the picture wants to carry the memories of their mistakes. Memory can be better than experience.
*2 trillionths of a second* ~Light in Motion
When I was little, I refused to take pictures, saying my memory would serve me better than a piece of paper ever could in the future. My parents complain that there is a large gap in my childhood because of the lack of pictures. But there is no gap. I remember it almost as well as I would with pictures, and I remember it without the nuisance of stopping my swim time on the beach to throw on a smile and stand too still.
When the blizzard hit this past week, and the streets were empty and beautiful as the snow fell, I had to pause several times when I started to pull out my phone to take a picture, and ask myself…
Uninterrupted wonder without photos, or a vivid memory to share with them?
Does experience dictate your life?
Or does memory?