Our memory is like a huge box where you can store all the moments that you want. However, it is so fragile that in a blink of an eye, you can forget things that you want to remember for the rest of your life. Now, you can keep those memories in a piece of paper, in your laptop, and you can bring them wherever you want. How? with photographs.
Nowadays, most of people have a camera with them in their cellphones, their laptops, digital cameras, etc. People can take a camera, snap, and record every instant that they want. It is like a diary in which you can appreciate in detail things that you can’t in a specific second. Photographs can change our minds, can change the way how we see the world. They are a testament to the history of life of all human beings, of nations, of significant global situations, and also, a testament to the most negative of humanity.
Pictures can transmit different emotions that are expressed forever in paper or digital media and people can interpret them in different ways. It’s like a travel to the past, and it’s free! You can even feel the same way you felt when the photo was taken. It’s a pure moment that no one can take it away from you, because it’s there in that piece of paper. However, technology has made this "purity" don’t exist anymore. Programs like Photoshop have made that reality can be transformed so that all we see is not real. You can look like a fat woman even if you are the skinniest person in the whole world or vice versa.
In addition, in this time social networks have spread very fast, and the photographs that you show there reflects people’s identity. Nevertheless, there are a minority that change its identity in order to be someone else, or just to make fool of others.
In conclusion, pictures can “say” so much things when you look at them. You can interpret them in different ways. For that reason, my question is: do you think that pictures can reflect what we feel in a specific moment? or now nothing is real?
Here is the first picture ever taken by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.
This post clearly triggered lots of memories of my innumerable picture watching sessions with my family. Although I love computers and I am passionate about finding ways that help me do my job more efficiently, when it comes to pictures, I still prefer pictures afforded by technologies in the past: printed pictures.
ReplyDeleteI guess this does not only have to do with the fact that I am from a older generation, but also with this idea that digital pictures have lost their essence. The magic of taking a picture and having to wait for a week to have it printed is lost nowadays as you can see yourself seconds away after releasing the shutter.