In my last post I told you about my holiday. While I was on holiday, I took many photos. I love taking photos.
Jon is not so enthusiastic about my photography. He likes the end results but not so much the process.
It leads to photos like this:
(I know I look like a wraith in this shot – it’s just the angle, honest. I think Jon looks like the children’s TV character Pob, if you remember him. Also – I am not naked, just to clarify.)
So – here is a snapshot (if you’ll pardon the pun) of our interaction on holiday. Jon had just delivered me on my sunbed, together with water, suncream, wrap, Kindle – and son.
“But the camera – would you be able to go back and get it?”
Jon scowled. He had been up since 6.30am entertaining a toddler while I had slept.
“I think you can do without the camera for once. Can’t you just enjoy things as they happen, make the most of the moment?”
I pouted. “But that IS me making the most of the moment. For me, recording is the enjoying.”
I could tell Jon thought I was a little bit weird. Perhaps it is weird. I know that everyone says we should ‘live in the moment’, experience everything fully without thinking about what it means or how to record it.
In a previous post I mentioned Donald Miller’s book on living our life as story. It has got me thinking a lot about story and how we bring meaning to our life.
It is a human instinct to want to shape our existence. Although we just float from one experience to another like a seed drifting in the wind, we don’t think like this. We shape, we structure, we punctuate. Our stories have beginnings, middles, endings, patterns, structures. We reflect on our experience, we frame it into art or story. We write poems, we take photos. We think of how we could summarise it in 140 characters or a Facebook status. Life is not just for living, it is for telling.
And I really enjoy the telling. For me, it makes the living more alive.
I have many more memories of my childhood and teenage years than Jon has. I can remember distinct events and feelings, whereas his formative years are a vague blur. He tends to identify memories through photos that have been taken.
I think this is because I kept a diary (journal) for many years. The years that I kept the diary are the clearest ones in my mind. I capture memories and treasure them up in my heart.
So I watched my boy splashing in the pool with Jon. For days he had protested at being in the pool, not liking the feeling of not being able to touch the floor. Now he was in a big rubber ring, in his Dad’s arms, pretending it was a boat. His face lit up with delight, and his joy spilled over to me. It was a magical moment, just begging to be captured for posterity.
AND I DIDN’T HAVE MY CAMERA.
***********
This would have been where I would have ended this post, had it not been for a conversation I had subsequently with Jon. I had smugly outlined why the unexamined life was not worth living. So what was his objection to it?
“There is a big difference between writing a journal after an event and taking photos or tweeting while the event is happening. The trouble is,” he explained, “you think you are enjoying this great story, and your view is the one through the camera, where you can see us clearly. Unfortunately, our view of you is this” – and he held up the camera to his face.
I suddenly got what he meant. He had disappeared behind the camera. I felt immediately disconnected from him, and more like I was an actor who needed to perform rather than a friend sharing a moment.
If you are tweeting or taking photos throughout a meeting or conversation, there’s a good chance that you will feel it is enhnancing your experience, as you are able to be both participant and producer. But as soon as you become producer, you distance yourself from others there.
I like being the audience, the writer, the director – but I need to be careful that my recording does not distance me from others. Begrudgingly, I admit that the ‘live life in the moment’ brigade may yet have a point.
Next holiday I shall limit myself to a mere 300 photos. Promise.
Over to you:
- Are you a ‘live in the moment’ person or ‘life is for the telling’ person?
I love this story, tanya!! such great lessons to be learned from it. and i am a big fan A Million Miles by Don Miller. Changed my life when I read it. Thank you so much for participating in the linkup! =)
Oh thank you! I’m so glad you enjoyed it! I have been loving the social media link up – thanks for doing it.
Heya Tanya
Thanks for your posts! I really enjoy reading them…. I have actually started leaving my camera/phone at home so i dont fall into the trap of having to document every second of my life. It can become a bit obsessive so I have laid back a bit. I think the good day that are special you will remember regardless if you have a camera/smartphone in your hand!
P.s I put you in my blogroll here: http://bryonyiow.blogspot.co.uk/
Best
Bryony
Thanks so much for the encouragment, Bryony, it’s much appreciated!
Great blog & lots to think about – here are a few:
I love it at weddings when people are photographed unawares. These usually depict the essence of the day more than the official posed photos and most of the people at the time of the photo are living in the moment. At my sons wedding the official photographer captured the bridesmaids all lost in worship (no iphones!) This summarised the essence of the day in a single shot, that God was with us throughout – an emotional, spiritual & visual memory.
A few years ago I videoed a performance by my daughter’s Youth Orchestra, by holding the camera at arms length. At the end of the performance I was crying buckets (parental pride, last school-age performance by the youngest child etc). At that time I was most definitely telling and living in the moment (we multi-tasking women!)
I love photographs, that capture the essence of who people are. Son 1 & daughter have often pulled faces in photos and over the years a particular pose has become known as ‘Karin-face’. So back to wedding photos, we were looking at our own from more than 25 years ago recently and there was my mum pulling the exact same ‘Karin-face’ in one of the unofficial photos 🙂
Thanks so much for these comments, Jo. The fact that it is an official photographer at weddings who captures all these intensely intimate moments so well makes me wonder if it would be good (assuming money were no object…) to have an official photographer alongside us all the time, to show us what those moments looked like when we were experiencing them. As you said, it’s a real gift to have photos that capture the essence of a person. I think it is in those moments when you don’t know you’re being photographed that really produce the magic.
Thanks for sharing!
Lovely post (and photos!)!! I too am ‘snap happy’ and love taking pictures of our holidays as well as our everyday lives. I’ve never thought of taking pictures on the same level as tweeting or Facebooking, though; maybe it is…?! But for me there is real value in photographs – like Jon I remember events more clearly for looking back over the photos and love to sit and reminisce with friends (some friends and I glanced over our wedding photos just last night…). We recently had a holiday to Disney and I compiled our (>400..) photos into a book and had it printed off – and only a few weeks after we got it the spine is worn in, the pages thumbed and curled, the pages splattered with food because our boys LOVE flicking through it and re-living the memories! It’s our youngest who loves it most and who would have thought that he (who was only 18 months at the time) got so much out of the holiday, enjoyed it so much that he wants to revisit it in his mind and imagination again! We wouldn’t have known if we didn’t have the photos to look over again and again (and again…)! Hopefully it will cement the memories in his young mind for when he’s older.
I think the similarity of the photos and tweeting/Facebooking is that we are wanting to record the memory in some way for ourselves and for others, and we do that by recording it at the time that the event is happening. I guess the difference between the photos in the way that you’re describing and tweets/facebook is the level at which you are sharing it. With a photo album you know exactly with whom you are sharing it, whereas Facebook the circle is wider, and Twitter, well…
I am also one of those who tries to actually print out the photos and make albums – I think that is also part of the ‘editing’ process we do of our lives. But like you, I find it very meaningful.
Thanks for stopping by!
Yes, I agree, we are recording the moment, recording the memory. But I think photos are different and have more longevity – do you know anyone who looks back to their facebook posts from 5 years ago?! Facebook and Twitter feel very ‘in the moment’ activities, but physical photographs can be viewed again & again, passed to the next generation in a way FB and Twitter can’t at the moment (that may change…). It would be interesting to keep a physical record of all our FB/Twitter remarks to be shared some 20 years hence! Photos can be matter of fact (as another reader has mentioned) but they can also be heavily biased: we only point the camera at the things we want to see and omit the scenes we don’t want to remember, so they are not without fault. I like and appreciate technology, but I’m also aware of the detrimental effects of spending far too long tapping buttons on a phone or computer. We were out for a family lunch last month and my other half exclaimed, ‘They’ve got free WiFi!!’ I told him not to even think about it, and was grateful he refrained, some things can be more important sometimes. Xx
Yes – good points here. I kinda wish we could access Facebook statuses (stati??) throughout the years. A while back I did a ‘year in Facebook statuses’ and it was really interesting to get a sense of all the major events that had happened in that year just through such short statements – but as you say, it’s so fleeting and temporary, and can’t easily be stored or passed on. I also agree with you that the priority should always be to the people we’re with, so that we can make sure that we are ‘present’ with them, and not endlessly tapping! It’s often all too easily done, and we don’t realise how much we’re connected to our internet devices rather than to others there with us.
I usually try and think “who are these photos for?” Sometimes I take photos because I want others to see what they had missed out on. For example, if one part of the family can’t be around for Christmas day. Other times, I want to remind myself.
One spectacle that is bizarre is when people go to sporting events and record things on their camera phones rather than watch and experience the action themselves. This is particularly noticeable in football, where the fans (if they are close enough) no longer want to shake the hand of the player who scored or hug them. Instead, they want their own shaky image which in all liklihood will be lost next time they get an upgrade.
But it does raise the idea of memory. Our brains are apt to play tricks on us. We remember things in certain ways, forgetting some parts, highlighting others. Photographs are (for the most part) just matters of fact. Memory has more of the feel of a painting about it. So then, the question is which do you prefer: imperfect memory that is coloured with emotion, or a matter of fact statement of events and places?
Of course, really good photographers can capture emotion, but I’m just not a very good photographer.
Great observations here. I’ve been thinking a lot about memory and how reliable it is, so this is definitely in my thoughts too. ‘Memory has more of the feel of a painting about it’ – love this.
It IS bizarre that people want the image rather than the experience (e.g. of meeting the famous person and shaking their hand). I guess it’s because we want ‘evidence’ that it’s happened, and want to share it with others, which is fair enough…but is it a case of preferring the simulacra to the real, the picture to the reality? It’s all going a bit Baudrillard!
Thanks for the welcome back! Most kind of you.
You made me snigger at the charismatic mobile phone videoer…! Are we just old??
Yes – I’m with you on the photo album thing. Will we have books to pass onto children and great-grandchildren or will they inherit our Facebook files? Or will the government have taken all our photos and confiscated the Internet? Or will we have been wiped out in an apocalyptic fireball? (getting a bit carried away there, but it seems that there are at least 3 good reasons for continuing to make albums…)
Thanks for the plug to vicky’s post – you know, I think I did miss that one! *hangs head in shame* It was really useful. Got a distinct feeling I hog the discussion a bit in the old tweets – but then again, that is very much how I am at dinner parties as well… At least I’m consistent!
Thanks for this – what have I missed on your blog? I love your posts!
Hiya.
First of all, welcome back! I figured you must be on holiday, due to the dearth of Twitter/blog work 🙂
We were at a wedding last weekend, and there was a chap in the congregation who I thought was having a charismatic hands-in-the-air sort of moment, until I realised he was holding his iPhone (other brands of mobile telecommunications device are available…) and videoing things.
As for the taking and using of photos, I would say we take far more and use far fewer these days. When was the last time your average photo-taker put together a photo album (a tangible one, that is – one of those oldy worldy books that only a handful of people can gather round, not one of those new fangled albums viewable by millions of people around the world all at the same time)?
Would I be safe to assume you’ve seen Vicky’s blog post that links quite nicely to this one? http://www.cyber-soul.com/2012/07/13/twitter-numbers-is-bigger-really-better/ I know it’s about tweeting not taking photos, but there are similarities! Techiquette (or something…)