By Chris Tucker, KERA 90.1 commentator
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-513241.mp3
Photo Nation: a commentary by Chris Tucker
2006 North Texas Public Broadcasting, Inc.
Dallas, TX –
Socrates said that the unexamined life was not worth living. In America these days, however, it's the unphotographed life that's not worth living. So we might conclude from the amazing penetration of camera phones, which now outsell both regular cameras and regular phones, and the explosion of websites like Flickr, YouTube, MySpace and FaceBook, where millions of people leave photo records of the momentous and mundane moments of their lives.
We have moved from an age of photo scarcity to an age of photo superabundance, a fact that really came home to me last year when my sister and I were trying to pull together photos of our father, who died in the mid-1980's. We came up with about eight images, of which only one was from his early life. I took more photos than that at a volleyball game last weekend.
Now the rise of Photo Nation has many healthy aspects. Digital media makes photography cheaper than ever, so we can shoot hundreds of pictures on a memory card, keeping only those we really like, without wasting film and money. People who must travel a great deal, members of the military and others can stay connected to those they love through almost-real time photos and video feeds.
And while it's tempting to say our memories are weakened by reliance on so many photographs, I think the opposite is sometimes true. I recently ran a PC slideshow of a 2004 trip to New York City, and when I watched my wife and daughter atop the Empire State Building, snowflakes in their hair, I recalled other things from that happy day, events that might have been forgotten without the photos.
All that's to the good, but there's a flip side to Photo Nation. As storage capacity has gotten larger and cheaper, we've lowered the bar on what's considered photo-worthy. On the video-sharing site YouTube, I recently watched a lengthy film of some people walking to their car in a downtown Dallas parking garage. Silly me, I kept waiting for something to happen. Maybe they'd run into an old high school pal. Maybe their car would be stole - but no. They just ... walked to the car. These days, we don't even have to visit someone's home to be bored by their home movies.
Thus the photo explosion is a radically small-d democratic phenomenon, putting an end to the old hierarchical notion that some images are more worthy of preservation than others. This week, the Flickr site listed more than 650,000 images of dogs. That's got to be more photos than were ever taken of FDR, Churchill, and Einstein combined.
Obviously, this photo frenzy has implications for historians and all those involved in preserving and understanding the past. A few years ago I was writing a magazine article about the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Knowing I was from Dallas, an Archives staffer said he had a surprise for me. We went into an adjoining room and there on a table, undergoing some touch-up work, was the original Zapruder film of the Kennedy Assassination. Though I'd seen the grim footage many times, there was something solemn and impressive about beholding the actual artifact.
If such a tragedy happened today, of course, there wouldn't be one Zapruder film but dozens, maybe hundreds, not to mention scores of camera-phone images of the event. Thus the historian of the near-future, rather than hunting rare photos of the great and small, may be overwhelmed by the sheer mass of photographic evidence. That's the big picture in Photo Nation today.
Chris Tucker writes about technology for Southwest Spirit magazine. If you have opinions or rebuttals about this commentary, call (214) 740-9338 or email us.