Reasons for taking pictures

Sort of a cynical take from Kirk Tuck via Phil Gyford:

Even the folks snapping away with their phones seemed less passionate about the endeavor yesterday. Almost as though we’ve all concluded that with the endless torrent of images being constantly shared everywhere that no individual shot or selection of shots matters anymore. Another drop in the ocean. Another futile attempt to carve out some sort of alternate viewpoint. A different visual perspective of a declining culture. Hello “The Americans” except that now everyone with a camera is a Robert Frank.

Gyford echoes the sentiment:

Anywhere that many people have been will have had everything photographed many times. Even a rarer sight might only generate photos that are similar to those taken elsewhere. Your clever composition is unlikely to be that clever or original.

Creating new visual content to put online and entertain people is not going away, even if Instagram perishes and Facebook albums become a historical relic. People will continue to post pictures of food and landscapes and friends online until the end of time.

But I think that the vast majority of pictures living in our iCloud Photo Libraries or on Google Photos aren't for public consumption, but for private viewings alone, or with friends with whom the photographed moment was shared. Photos snapped on my phone aren't masterpieces awaiting recognition; they're little snippets of my life that I know my soft brainulum is too weak to recall accurately many years hence.

Maybe I'm more of a visual thinker—maybe that's why photos are such a comfort to me in wistful moments after the sun goes down, when I turn back on days gone by. I struggle to remember what it was like to be somewhere, what it was like to experience something, without a photo or a little 10-second clip of video to put me right back in the moment.

Just got back from a walk with the dog in the dark; on the railway path between Deaf Hill and Station Town we were briefly followed by a far off light flashing on and off at intervals. Sam thinks that it was folks out lamping for rabbits in the night. We put Ghyll back on his lead and hightailed it out of the woods, seeing nary a soul until we got back to the takeaways across from our estate.

Copied a few more Everything You Have Heard posts over to the blog tonight, which triggered another wave of nostalgia and a bit of a rally in the spirit of recording memories. A couple of folks in our lives are coming, day by day, to the end of theirs, which has got me thinking about what I’ll leave behind when I go too, one day. I don’t intend on leaving much—I think I’d like to Die With Zero if you please—but I hope that I’ll have accrued a significant body of writing (even if most of it’s not particularly interesting) indicating what kind of person I was, and maybe featuring a novel perspective on some bit of niche paraphernalia (teaching in Japan, living in the North East as a Canadian). I hope that, whoever you are, this blog speaks to you in some remote way—even if you’re just me in 10 or 20 years.

One thing I don’t think I’ll be remembered for is my writing on web development and tech in general; although I guess that can’t be discounted. I’m feeling somewhat unmoored from my identity as a Person Working on the Web lately, but I like to write about my work as a way to puzzle out how I actually feel about things. I liked this post about mildly dynamic websites; not only did I agree with what it said, it proved that industry-specific (that’s not to say technical) writing still resonates with me, at least a little bit. There’s still a value to reading opinion pieces like this—so I’ll continue to try and write them, too, when the fancy strikes me.

Feeling weepy-eyed and nostalgic tonight because I watched a short video that my brother William put together out of home movies from some time in 1993. My grandparents on my dad's side are still alive, and my parents are young and bouncy, and I'm still small enough to be picked up & carried. I've not done a particularly good job of keeping artefacts from before I was 16 or 17, so this feels particularly precious. Then again I've always been susceptible to nostalgia.

Been slowly moving the posts from Everything You Have Heard over to this blog, as well. It's been a fun trip back to my first year in Hokkaido, even if I was a little gung-ho with the approach to writing.

It makes me wonder: ten or twenty years hence, what will I want to remember from today? Certainly not my petty attitudes towards edge functions, nor wonder at golfed JavaScript, nor any of the other things I post on here to keep my blog tech-related. I'll want home movies, pictures of my day-to-day, exasperation with Ghyll or excitement about riding the motorbike.

I oughta be a bit better about recording this kinda stuff.

Home Movies, Deadharrie