Our Life in Photographs: the Art of Remembering or Technological Distraction?

Flickr, a popular photo uploading and sharing website, receives over 4,800 images a day that are shot with Apple's iPhone 4. In fact, the iPhone 4 is currently topping the charts as the most popular camera among Flickr users (out-shooting Nikon's popular D90 DSLR.)

With the rise in popularity of cell phones with cameras and small, user-friendly digital cameras, it is no wonder that almost everywhere we go, we can witness someone taking a picture, or have our picture taken. Since cameras of all varieties can now fit in our purses and even our pockets, we can use them to capture any and every daily moment, and many of us do. I am interested in exploring here our desire to record our lives through our abundant and very present technological devices.

Sherry Turkle, author of the book Alone Together, refers to this phenomenon as "life capture." She writes, "These days, anyone with a smart phone (equipped with a camera and/or video recorder) is close to having a portable archivist. And indeed, many say that when they don't use their mobile phone to document their lives, they feel remiss, guilty for not doing so" (pp. 299-300).

The desire to record our life experiences (and the concerned response over this constant archiving) is nothing new. During my senior year of college, I embarked upon an adventure called "Europe Semester" with fifty other students and three professors from my university. In three and a half months we visited twelve countries with one suitcase, and little technology (compared to what we might have brought now in 2011.) With no laptops, a few iPods and digital cameras, and even fewer cell phones, many of us (including myself) furiously recorded our experiences in our handwritten journals and on our film cameras. Even without much technology, I often felt distracted by my own desire to record all of my experiences. (I have to admit, sometimes I would even visit a point of interest and imagine how the layout of photographs and ticket stubs would appear in my scrapbook.) However, even though I was often thinking of my scrapbook layouts, I don't believe that I experienced those moments and places any less, just simply through a different lens. To some, capturing and recording a place or event through technology allows them to experience the space more richly and with new artistic perspectives.

CS Lewis writes in The Great Divorce, "If you're interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country." Here he questions if we are truly experiencing the places, people, and events of our lives to the fullest if we are caught up in the business of recording it all. I appreciate this point and wonder about the distraction and possible burden that life recording may cause. I also know that I am very thankful for the photographs and journal entries that serve as the only tangible memories of this college experience.

I am drawn to the ways that photographs serve as a method, an art, of remembering. Several web-based photographic collaboration projects speak to the ways photographs preserve moments in time. "Dear Photograph" is a new tumblr that curates submissions of photographs that juxtapose older photographs, and the space and time in which they were taken, with that same space in a current context (see example below). Check out the tumblr to read the sweet/moving/nostalgic photo captions. Artist Jason Powell takes on a similar concept in his Flickr series titled, "Looking into the Past." However, instead of using personal photographs, he has chosen to use images from the Library of Congress as his subject matter. He has also created a group on Flickr, which allows others interested in a similar process of remembering to upload and share their photographs as well.

I love the way Frederick Buechner, in his compilation of essays titled A Room Called Remember, describes the process of remembering as an important and intentional practice:

"But there is a deeper need yet . . . —not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived." - Frederick Buechner

I know, without a doubt, that my own practice of remembering is aided by the photographs that I (or my friends and family) have taken. Photographs elicit memories of moments and experiences that vanished too quickly to be written down. For a short time at least, photographs can bring back emotions, people, or places as we once experienced them. Photographs are an important part of the art of remembering.

However, our drive to constantly archive our lives through our technological devices brings several issues into question. First, Sherry Turkle is concerned that through our "life capture," we might slowly lose the ability to remember. She writes, "If technology remembers for us, will we remember less? Will we approach our own lives from a greater distance?" (p. 300). If we only remember a person or experience when the photograph appears on our screen saver or Facebook wall, have we missed the work, the intentionality of remembering that Buechner writes about? What becomes lost, when we forget how to remember?

Turkle also suggests that our desire to keep up with our own life archive is not only an act of remembering, but also an act of seeking validation. Many of us might send our iPhone pictures straight to Twitter or Facebook, in order to immediately share our experiences with our friends. Turkle writes, "But these days, the photograph is not enough. Sending implies being" (p. 302). We wait with anticipation for a friend's vacation photos to appear on our Facebook feed. If they never appear, we wonder if our friend lost their phone, or maybe even that their trip plans got canceled. This might cause one to wonder, if we didn't photograph it, were we really there?

Others are concerned about the distraction that constant life capture through digital photography devices may cause. A recent article by the author of the popular blog Off Beat Bride describes how some couples are electing to have an "unplugged wedding," asking guests to not use their cameras or electronic devices for a certain portion of time during the day, or not at all. The author, Ariel, writes, "Welcome to the era of the over-documented wedding, where, even if you've hired someone to take photos, every guest has a camera and an iPhone and is tweeting the whole event. They're there with you, but are they really present?" Off Beat Bride also offers "copy 'n' paste" ideas for wording on programs and signs to inform guests politely of the unplugged policy.

Susan Sontag, author, director, and activist, wrote in her book On Photography: "Photography has become one of the principle devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation . . .Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera’s interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing" (p. 10-11). Turkle would probably agree with Sontag here, as she completes her book Alone Together on the last page by questioning if the archived life is truly living?

I end here with a couple of questions for us to think about: What drives our desire to archive our lives through technology? What might we gain or what might we miss as we capture experiences through our abundant and ever-present technological devices? And last, do you view this phenomenon as an art of remembering or a technological distraction, or somewhere in between?

Image Credits (in order of appearance):
1. Derren Raser
2. Leslie Kalbfleisch via Dear Photograph
3. Nora and Tony of Aurora Photography via Off Beat Bride

Works Cited:
Buechner, Frederick. A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces. San Francisco: Harper, 1992. Print.
Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. New York: Macmillan, 1946. Print.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York : Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Print.
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Print.