Sorting images
31/10/12 05:22
I went out on our deck after supper last night and snapped a few pictures of the moon. I don’t have a particularly fancy camera and I am not much of a photographer, really, but I enjoy photographs as a way of capturing memories. Photography has changed so much in recent years that the purpose and use of pictures is very different. Years ago, when I took a photography class from Archie Lieberman, each image was carefully selected, printed and displayed. The particular class that I took required to us to submit black and white photographs mounted on mat board. Our prints were to be a minimum of 11” x 14”. We hung our pictures around the room and then took a tour of the class’s work as if walking through a gallery. The assumption was that each image was a handcrafted work chosen for its artistic value. The pictures were expected to last.
These days photographs are sent directly from a cell phone or tablet computer to an internet social site. It is not uncommon for people to post dozens of pictures in a matter of a few minutes. Our lives are filled with images that change so often that it is almost like watching a movie. For that matter, many cell phones now can take digital video images and the resulting movies can be posted on the Internet with similar ease. I have read that on the site YouTube 48 hours of video is uploaded every minute. It is literally impossible to watch all of the video that is on the site. It may be technically impossible for one person to watch all of the videos of cats on YouTube.
As a result, our perception of photographs has changed. There was a time, near the beginning of the development of photography, when each image took hours to produce and, once produced people would study that image intently. A static image simply does not command our attention any more. The filmmaker Ken Burns discovered that when he began to incorporate historic photos into his documentary films. People won’t look at a photograph enough to perceive what they have seen. Burns developed a way of subtly making a still photograph appear to have motion. He would focus on a single detail and then gradually widen the perspective to include the entire photograph or reverse the process and start with an image of the photograph and slowly zoom into a single detail. The process is now known as the “Ken Burns Effect” and is considered to be a standard when projecting images. The effect is now available in simple presentation software.
We are so inundated by images that we don’t treasure individual images the way we once did. In the future those wanting to tell the story of our time will have so many images to sort through that many images will be lost amid the clutter.
I remember visiting the home of friends many years ago. They were very organized people and their home was always neat. It was comfortable and inviting for guests and each item was always put away. There was no clutter on kitchen countertops or tables. Even the end tables in the living room were neatly organized. Yes, the spices were arranged in alphabetical order in the spice rack. We visited these friends regularly and occasionally commented on the neatness of their house. It was a contrast with our usual level of clutter. One day when I was visiting, our friend went looking for a photograph of a recent church event. I watched with delight as she opened a drawer that was filled to the brim with unorganized images. There were many packets of photographs from the drugstore all piled in the drawer in no apparent order. In those days I was doing predominantly slide photography and my slides were all neatly stacked in boxes, with the date range of each box labeled. It was a moment of triumph to discover one area of life where I was more organized than our friends who had appeared, until that moment, to be so much more organized than we.
Of course those were the old days. These days that friend has a neat row of well-organized photo albums. We have a computer in our home with over 24,000 digital images on it. We are constantly adding to the collection on the computer by scanning slides and old photographs. The boxes of 11 x 14 black and white images along with the negatives of those photo shoots are in storage and it doesn’t appear that we will get to them anytime soon.
I may not have a drawer of printed photographs, but the image of that drawer of unorganized photographs certainly sticks in my mind as a metaphor for the way photographs are taking over my life. I find myself using more an more stock and news photographs in my daily blog simply because the Internet is easier to search than my photo files.
What I really need to do is to sort through all of those images and delete the ones that do not have lasting value. If I do not, I risk leaving a legacy to the next generation where the trash and the goodies are so intermingled that everything is discarded, including the few gems that should be preserved. It is easy to imagine someone simply never getting around to looking through all of the images.
Sorting through clutter is one of the primary tasks of people my age. Eric James called it integration and identified it as the primary developmental task of older adults. Making sense out of all of the experiences, organizing the memoir, telling the story in a meaningful way – these tasks all require deciding what to keep and what to discard.
But I find myself taking more pictures rather than sorting through the ones I have. I added 15 or 20 shots to the digital files last night. Maybe one image is worth sharing. I’ve included it in today’s blog. The rest do not need to be saved. Eric Erickson would say that I’ve gotten hung up in generativity and need to move on to integration. Perhaps he’s right. Maybe I’m just a little slow in my development.
With the mountains of things I’ve got to sort, it doesn’t appear that boredom will invade my life anytime soon.