Doesn’t our era where everyone takes photos of everything not mark a decline in the pleasure of living?
It’s hard to remember when it was necessary to have a camera with you to take photos. Today, any smartphone, even the most basic, has a photo module that would make any device from previous generations green with envy. Unfortunately, constantly having this camera with us seems to have created a pathology that pushes us all to take photos of many moments, which we would not have even imagined trying to immortalize before!
We no longer see, we take photos of what we see
Open your iPhone 15 or Samsung Galaxy S23, and go to your photo folder. Quickly review the photos displayed on the scrolling screen. How many of these files seem to you to illustrate memorable memories that you would like to keep for 5 years, 10 years or 15 years? Almost none, admit it! And yet you will continue to take photos in the future.
Whether in concert, during a sporting event, at an evening, or even simply in everyday life, as soon as a little thing seems out of place, the new humans no longer look directly, but through the screen. And all this to, most of the time, never look at these photos and videos again. As for the past moment, it will only evoke vague memories, at least, much less than if it had been observed directly. So, what is really the point of photographing and filming everything? We wonder that.
Travel like on Google Images
The unhealthy side of this habit is seen even more clearly on vacation. Here again, a little comparison with the pre-smartphone era may be useful. Go take a look at your old photo albums. We already took a lot of photos in the 90s and 2000s, when we went on vacation. But it is interesting to note that we mainly captured moments of joy between people who went together, or with friends met at the vacation spot. All in all, we will find quite few images of iconic places or historical monuments.
Today, although we cannot say that it is necessarily the opposite, we still see a significant proportion (which is often the vast majority) of vacation photos representing monuments or places “to see” . It’s as if photography and the opportunity to take photos have become the main purpose of vacation.
Yours truly was even able to see the most ridiculous illustration of this trend in Japan, at the Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto, famous for its avenue of toriis (vermilion Japanese porticos). The place is one of the most famous in Japan, and extremely long queues of tourists form there so that everyone can take a photo of themselves, framed in such a way that one seems to be enjoying an extremely calm place. and surprisingly disorienting, when in reality, a hundred people push 50 centimeters from the photographer to quickly be able to take the photo in turn.
Has going on vacation, an activity whose primary function, it seems, is to rest, has transformed into a frenzied desire to (badly) copy Google Images? Can’t we imagine that in the future it may be necessary to restrict smartphone cameras, and authorize a finite number of photos and videos that can be taken each month, just to send their user back into reality, where they is it about living? This is obviously just a simple hypothesis. Because the author clearly does not want to attract the wrath of Instagram and TikTok fans!
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