In a period of 4 years from 2012 to 2016 I shared 138 photos of home made meals, 156 restaurant dishes, 38 bottles of wine, 389 pictures of variously blurred musicians in flagrante, as in caught in the act of making music and other records of my newly divorced life in San Francisco. Pictures of my increasingly more and more adult children and the new love of my life annotate that period. As all hip and connected San Franciscans I shared, liked and upvoted my way across Darth Zuckerburg’s Empire. And then I realized what Facebook (and YouTube) were quietly doing to democracy with Brexit and the equally vexatious election of the Mango Mussolini, and they continue to this day to support and succor Russian bot armies.
I have shared innumerable pictures at an exhibition, family snaps, shots of gardens and sunsets. More recently pictures of immense Charolais bulls in their bucolic majesty. My parents shared pictures with their friends but they fell in love with slides, family holiday pictures changed from. being Kodachrome rectangles and became tiny white bordered dark squares only revealing their contents when held up to the light. Slides, stored in plastic cases until put into the projector carousel and proudly presented in a darkened room. Slides, where you took a small 3×3 picture and blew it up to cover the living room wall or another bit of 70’s essential man-cave material, the standing screen. My father, the engineer and former instrument maker built his own projector and my mother the former seamstress made the screen from white vinyl material. They were not the most slick polished equivalent articles but they were functional in a good old ‘Heath Robinson’ way and the magic of the slide show allowed our family to group, to gather, share, like and upvote on our most recent holiday.
Slides were superseded by dirt cheap duplicate sets of 4″x6″ prints and Super 8 was soon replaced by video, its main advantage being you didn’t need the lumbering and precarious screen, you just plugged the camera into the ubiquitous TV. I never got the bug to be constantly filming your young child’s every action so happily avoided serially following another temporary technology. Then the I-phone arrived and the world changed.
We share. It’s a human activity. Before any technology we shared stories, gossiped about our friends, family and foes. The various forms of the captured image, from daguerreotype to the black and white photos that annotated much of the twentieth century, derive our sense of much of the major events. History is evidenced and embroidered by these images. Staged family portraits of families in their Sunday best were one of the proofs of rising wealth, proof positive that perhaps we were succeeding as much as we were working 60 hours a week underground digging coal to do so.
Putting a camera in everyone’s hands we can lay firmly at the feet of Steve Job and within 10 years he had ruined the experience of going to any art museum or major tourist attraction. I suppose I cannot hold him directly responsible for the selfie-stick, nor for those sweet examples of humankind who insist on using their pad devices the sizes of small trays as cameras in the Uffizi. This was followed shortly after by the diminution of music concerts to being a room full of people holding up their phones to record the act on stage, while blocking the person behind them’s view of the stage. I sure we all enjoy the frisson of schadenfreude whenever we hear of yet another unfortunate falling to their death in some scenic spot while straining too far for that ultimate selfie. Social media is obviously the cement that has embedded the action of recording every event of our lives by a photo. On an individual basis they capture the moment in a way that we hopes fixes the emotion, bottles the essence of the dish, meal, restaurant, holiday, honeymoon or other point of punctuation to quotidian life, even though we know that one sense truly cannot capture the others.
If I look through Apple’s Photos app retrospectively, using what they ironically call Recents, which in my case starts in 2009, by using the scrolling bar it’s a fast forward replay of my life over the last 12 years. I have been grabbing at the moments flying by, capturing what impresses me or inspires me, fixing reminders of wines or beers or dishes I want to revisit. I have my screensaver set to that folder and I often walk back into my office to see the random kaleidoscope of those images and the memory comes back. A sweaty dark club illuminated by stage lights and blurs with guitars, works of art squatting in the bright light of a gallery, faces beaming full of love, cartoon like still life of golden stone against green fields under blue skies. As much as I shun social media I understand the place that Instagram occupies in the hearts of people and as much as I abhor Meta people gonna share.
Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy 