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Since I was born, phones have been a common concept. It’s never been something that we’ve questioned as a generation, in fact, it's hard to imagine a world without this sort of advanced technology at all. Most kids have probably heard about stories from their parents of how different things were before the creation of iphones, but the one thing that I was constantly taught by my dad was how different photography used to be.
So as ironic as it sounds, coming from a leader of our school’s main film and photography team, the one thing I would un-invent is cameras, digital and film, or video and photography cameras alike.
Before digital cameras existed, (at least from what I hear), you’d have to buy a roll of film and a film camera to take photos. With the limited amount of snapshots you had, you would use them to try to keep as many moments as you could (probably, I wouldn't know), without wasting any piece of film. Following that, my dad would make the same statement every time, about how “you would have to value each shot more”.
The first and most obvious consequence of this, is that we suddenly value the moments we stand in more. When you know you’ll be unable to come back to something in the future, things tend to seem happier, more bright, and more real. As a collective, we’d probably end up spending a lot more time doing more menial tasks, and spend a lot more time with each other. When experiences can’t be shared through a slip of paper or a few MBs on someone's phone, the urge to let people in on a moment grows further. Even if it sounds grim, finality is the main motivator for action. The clouds may never land in the same way, while the sun might not hit the leaves at the same angle. The urgency to truly be part of a moment can suddenly trump the need to record it forever.
At the same time, even when we value things more in this way, it’s true that things may be easily forgotten. Someone that you haven’t been able to see for a while, or a place that you haven't gotten the chance to visit again. But even with cameras, sometimes it can shift our reality, and how we perceive what is “perfection”, and what we believe true aesthetic “beauty” may be.
Especially through the usage of digital cameras, we as a people strive for the perfection within a frame that is out of reach. When the colours are out of tune, the saturation can be turned up to make it seem brighter, the darkness can be swapped out and things can be dramatised with the addition of a vignette. On top of that, the newest fad: XiaoHongShu filters being put on top of selfies.
When you process a photo of a sunset, and the sky is an off hue of orange, the first thing that comes to mind is not that the sky is not pretty enough, but instead that the camera must not be good enough. Yet that is enough to shape how we felt that moment, and the meaning that it originally had has shifted to the idea that “it doesn’t look as good in the photo”.
And somehow, the blemish is now plastered over your memory instead.
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But as most things do, there is still a literal and a metaphorical meaning to things. Although a camera could capture what hypothetically would be a “forever”, the acceptance of a beginning and an ending of all things are what brings it more value. The belief that things will be over when you leave and your own control over how things end is a valuable lesson in how we act as a people.
But once again, as most things do, there’s always a connection to how we learn as well. The idea of having a deadline and a time limit causes urgency (and in some cases stress as well), but it's also what pushes us to learn things and understand things with actual want and need. When given infinite time, although I’d like to think I would do work at a timely manner, the truth is that the understanding is depleted, with the too-familiar concept of procrastination.
So labeling it time constraints is probably too harsh for the only thing that really pushes us to figure stuff out before time makes us do it ourselves. The last thing that we can actually take action on is not to try to change time itself, but learn how to use time to our advantage. You never know that you’re in a time you’ll miss until its already past, and you’ll never know which moments you're going to look back on months in the future, nor do you know when you’re finally going to get started on the writing project that you said you would do a year back.
Condensing a moment into a single photo and calling it “an everlasting memory” feels like an underestimation of what they really feel like. The finality, the last moment you’ll get and the final time you get the chance to do something is too great of a privilege, and a tool for us to try to output with a mix of 3 colours (which in hindsight, is really 6, since it depends on what medium of photography you choose).
“But is that really enough justification to remove cameras as a whole?”
Probably not, but the moving pictures that we’ve suddenly been raised with have made us dramatic too, so there's another effect that we probably didn't establish.
Somewhere out there, there's probably a photo of a poem that showed something along the lines of this that’s been written better than I possibly could. Where exactly is it? I’m not sure. I don't have any pictures of it, you’ll have to search for it, do the research, and go see it for yourself.
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