Our Shared History

Yesterday was World Photography Day.   You didn't get a long weekend, and there were no fireworks to mark the occasion.  Photography has become so much a part of our normal lives that we don't even think about them any more.  Most of us have thousands of photographs stored on a phone or computer.  They are as normal to us as our speech.  I want to take a moment to reflect on why photography matters.

No one who is alive today remembers a time when there was no photography.  This is because usable photography was developed in the 1820's.  There was image capture earlier than that, but it took too long to be usable.  If you are interested, here is a good summary of the history of photography.  People over the age of 30 will, however, remember when it wasn't as easy to see your photos as it is today.

Remember film?  My father and I are both shutter bugs.  We would go on family vacations and take about 8 rolls of film each.  At 36 frames per roll that meant, we were taking over 280 pictures each, not knowing until we got home whether any of those were worth having.  We took our rolls of precious film to Eckerd Drugs and put them in envelopes that were dropped into a slot and sent to "the lab."  Four days and a hundred dollars later, we would pick up our prints.  After sorting out the blurry, the overexposed, the underexposed, the finger in frame, and other such errors, we often found two or three pictures that were really worth enlarging to 8 x 12 (that's right) and hanging on the wall. In an interview, a National Geographic photographer said he took 300 rolls of film to get enough for a spread (usually 8-10 photos), so I didn't feel so bad.

That little walk down memory lane is not what I want to write about.  I want to write about the meaning of photography.  Our history as a people was once passed down by oral tradition.  Then came writing.  The ability to capture an image is just a progression in sharing history.  Photography gives all of us a shared history.  Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong are the only people to see each other on the moon with their own eyes, but we share that historic moment because they took photos.  When the concentration camps were liberated, the instruction was given to take as many pictures as possible.  Otherwise, no one could believe how bad it was.  Unless you were in New York City on September 11, your memories are shaped entirely by the pictures taken by those who were.

These events all took place when photography was the realm of professionals and hobbyists.  Even on 9/11, phones with cameras were not as ubiquitous as they are now.   The people who took the photos of those historic moments meant to capture something big.  Now, almost everyone can capture what is happening in front of them at the moment it happens.  They can also share it almost instantly with everyone in the world.  This may or may not be a good thing.  On the one hand, ease leads to lack of thought.  Twitter doesn't require that you think before you post.  Instagram never asks if you are sure about what you are sharing with the world.  When film had to be developed, no one would have wasted that frame on a shot of their lunch.  Also, more people doing something hasn't always made us better at it.  People post a lot of blurry shots.  On the other hand, the shared history of photographs means that we now have a visual record of more things than we have ever had before.  What the printing press did for writing, cameras on phones will do for imaging.  It is too soon to know what this will one day mean, but I feel like it will mean something.

The next time you are looking through a history book or an old National Geographic and see a familiar image, think about the connectedness that image brings.  Everyone else who see that image shares it with you.