A Picture Is Worth…

I struggled long and hard with whether or not I should post this picture. There’s really no reason not to. It’s a fairly innocuous shot of me on my vacation taken in Watkin’s Glen Gorge (wearing a Spotobe t-shirt!). I’m not smoking crystal meth in it or anything, but I still wasn’t sure whether this was an appropriate forum. Technically this blog isn’t mine. I think for it to be effective and enjoyable to you, it has to take on my personality to a certain point, but I’m not sure how much.

That’s really beyond the point, because the questions in my mind about posting this picture were more about the forum than about the actual act of posting it. Ever since former Gawker editor Emily Gould’s oversharing manifesto in New York Times Mag, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how our internet persona changes the way we live our daily lives. On my vacation, I realized that it has absolutely changed the way my generation takes photos.

People have always had photo guilt. Most of us have a fear of not properly documenting moments that are important parts of our lives. That’s always been the case, but in the past, I think people were largely afraid of not having enough documentation for themselves.  Now, people are afraid that they won’t have enough to show everybody else.

I think this is significant. I’ve heard people go as far as to say that it’s sad, but I think that’s reductionist and reactionary.  It does beg the question though, why do we feel the need to take the photos that we shoot, and why do we put completely inane pictures in public spaces for the world’s consumption.

I’ve probably taken six vacations to the finger lakes in my 24 years and change. It’s a place that holds a lot of meaning for my family, and I know every inch of the gorge in Watkins Glen State Park. Nevertheless, when I was walking through it last week, I felt pressured to take pictures. Not even pictures of myself or my family; that would make sense on some level, because people change over time, and a series of pictures taken in a similar context highlights those changes. I certainly didn’t need to take pictures of the gorge, but I felt obligated to take pictures so everyone else could see what I had seen.

Clearly that’s always been part of the mystique of photography. You come home from a trip and you show your friends the pictures. It’s more than that now. Taking pictures used to be an experience that was largely personal or at least familial. Now, for much of my generation, it has become incredibly public. I have never posted a photo gallery on my facebook page, but I have been tagged in plenty of photos. Nevertheless, I’m not even in the same ballpark as one of my online friends who has been tagged 1,456 times.

More than anything else, the ability to tag photos has changed the way the facebook-generation views photography. Older generations took photos on special occasions. When I was in college, there were a few of my friends who you could follow weekend-to-weekend, party-to-party, just by looking at the photos they had been tagged in. I’m not sure there is anything wrong with that. It might be slightly arrogant for my friend to tag herself in 1,220 photos. It might be completely pointless to wrap your arm around a random friend, hold out the camera in front of yourself and… wait for it… <>click<> … 25 times at every party you go to, but that doesn’t make it dangerous. Part of it is just an offshoot of the availability and affordability of cameras, and the ease of taking and storing pictures these days.

But it is a crazy experience just browsing through my friend’s photo galleries. I just did, and I found some interesting things. I found a gallery of pictures taken by some of my friends on a vacation I’m not sure why I wasn’t invited on. I found a strikingly odd gallery of posed photos taken of a girl I once knew. I also found an old picture of me, beer in hand, earrings in ear, on the night that I introduced two friends who are still dating three years later. That was worth remembering, and it brought a smile to my face. Like I said, the way we think about photos today is different, not necessarily wrong.

This really has very little to do with events or entertainment in Central Pennsylvania, but you’ll have to excuse some cultural essaying from time to time. And for what it’s worth, here are two pictures of my vacation. Enjoy.