When the british brought the first cameras to some tribes in africa the africans got really scared and refused to pose for the photographs. They had thought that if a camera captures your image it will also capture your soul that will be locked in it forever. That’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure if the african who said that was being literal or if that was a metaphor. If he really meant “soul” or the fact that something about him could be printed for everyone to see and could be able to move away from his actual self forever yet still be able to show his features. I love to go to concerts and i was in an U2 concert a couple months ago. It amazed me the amount of people with cameras. I could say the audience was not watching the show but taking pictures or videos of it. Most people literally saw Bono mostly through the screen of their cyber shots. It that african witnessed that scene he would maybe realize he was totally right about that “soul cage”. My generation is using digital media to archive our passage through life and in this process we are spreading our “soul” all around in a zillion tiny pieces. Don’t get me wrong. I love photography as na art where the photographer searches for memorable examples of what is enchanting in this world and it’s impressive how effective these images can be over people’s emotions. Unfortunately the records my generation is producing is mostly mediocre. Art and inspiraton is certainly not the reason all these folks were taking shots of the event. Today if you don’t have an image to show you didn’t see it. The power of the word is less important than the power of the image. It really makes me afraid because for one to record there should be a subject and if more and more people are interested in only recording there will be less and less content. A world filled with images that have no soul.
I understood what you were talking about until the very end when you started talking about registering…and then I did not understand what you meant by that.
To register means to take a photograph that has no artistic side of it. It’s just a register of a moment like what we all do when we photograph friends and events and kids and daily stuff just to remember afterwords…
Giulas, belo texto! a abordagem é perfeita.
sobre essa história das tribos africanas acreditarem que a câmera capturava a alma da pessoa, realmente acontecia. Pela própria cultura e espiritualidade que eles carregam, com uma ligação forte com magia, conectados com planos paralelos, eles realmente acreditavam que tinham sido roubados pela “caixinha mágica”.
no final das contas, é a geração atual que perdeu a alma em prol desses registros rasos e em excesso de tudo e qualquer coisa. infelizmente.
um abraço!!
Obrigado amigo!!! Como você é uma fera na fotografia sei bem que isso atua diretamente na sua área… É dificil encontrar espaço para expor seu trabalho no meio de tanta coisa que polui o espaço visual das pessoas no dia a dia….
For me that is not just a register at all. There is an artistic side to it too.
Than it’s not a register… That’s the idea…when you look for something else than the register of the moment and you seach the right framing or the best colours and anything that can be aesthetic you are going to the artistic side. some people really doesn’t care for that… it’s not a matter of one being better than the other. They are 2 totally different things. My point is that artistic photography is done today as much as any other time in the last 90 years but register photography grew hundreds of thousands times in the last 15 years after digital photography was delivered to the public.
Maybe then a truly gifted writer’s words will become even more cherised.
Well… Cherished by some i guess… Like me and you maybe… Others will get less and less quality in their information and culture…
I just posted my register on my website. I want you (please) to look at it and tell me if you truly think that there is no artistic side to it. Thank you.
As i just told you in the other comment if one wants photographs can be artistic. I heard many times in my life things like “i look old in that” in really beautiful pictures. That means they are not looking for the photograph but for them selves and they really don care much about the aesthetics or any artistic quality…
Very thoughtful post, and very well expressed.
That reaction — “don’t capture my soul!” — can sound naive. But there is a deep meaning, and you have stated it better than I have ever seen done before.
Here is a related post from one of my blogs:
It is a similar observation, at least a related one, about modern life.
Thank you very much!!! I’ll read it!!
Great story!!! I’ll post here so i don’t forget it!!!
“A white explorer in Africa, anxious to press ahead with his journey, paid his porters for a series of forced marches. But they, almost within reach of their destination, set down their bundles and refused to budge. No amount of extra payment would convince them otherwise. They said they had to wait for their souls to catch up.”
I definitely hear you on this one, sir!
On the one hand it’s great that so many people now possess the ability to express themselves so easily (and there is an awful lot of good stuff out there – the quantity of which is almost depressing in a way). But on the other hand, when it becomes that easy… it can really take away from the desire to use these tools to create something memorable… it’s a literal flood of point-and-thoughtless-shooting…
Totally… And what scares me is that people are forgetting to use their eyes to remember as we didi before with numbers and infos. Today if i don’t look at my notebook i don’t know what i have to do or what’s the number of my parents home. People are doing this with photos. Maybe someday we can loose a great deal of our visual memory.
To add to this, the over use of our eyes with visual media is denting our ability as a species to use sounds, music and the spoken word as part of our memories (and so imagination).
I think (as a matter of language) that a little confusion might arise from your using the verb “to register” to mean what is more frequently referred to in English as “to record,” as in —- doing something “for the record”.
Like, my standing in front of the Taj Mahal is not to show the beauty of the Taj Mahal, but to show that I was there.
So many tourists do this! In a way they are tourists in their own life; maybe this is something of what you mean?
Thank you very much! You are right… record sounds much better than register. I don’t know why it didn’t come to my mind when i was writing it. Well… that’s the problem when you think you can write in another language than yours.. LOL … i’ll change it in the post 🙂
Very insightful article, giulas. I think you are right – images are now so easy and so frequent and so “everyday” it degrades the value and meaning of great images. We struggle to see the forest for the trees. Facebook is a publication of their lives for some people, it seems, as an example.
Yes… I know people like that… I know people that narrates the soap opera on twitter…
Yes, I agree with you. I think that Facebook could be a good example of that.
I lost my Twitter password. I have no been in there for days…
I think that I am going to have to send them a letter through the US Postal Service to get a new password. Does any one know how to contact Twitter?
may I ask what ” dia” means in english?
anyway…I have to agree. I was just thinking about this the other day. the place where I work recently agreed to allow people to start taking photos of the artefacta on display. For me, this was a dreadful mistake. Now people only see these ancient relics through their digital viewfinder, snap a shot, then carry on! As you said, “proof” that they saw it…ironic really, since it generally seems to prove they did not see it at all.
“dia” means day… “dia a dia” means day by day…
True…that’s my point…what scares me is the day when they’ll have to look at these photos to remember…
Ailis, do you work at a museum?