Take A Picture, Why Don't You?

Six tiny gingko leaves flap in a stiff breeze this morning, clinging to a skeleton of branches that only last week held a full bounty of gold. Sunlight suffused their color one morning not long ago and as I stared at them, a young man walking down the hill stopped, pulled out his phone, and snapped a shot of them.

This is an action that is almost a reflex in our time but when I was little, it was unheard of. Snapshots took place during occasions, a school picnic, a wedding, a family excursion. Bringing out the camera, and there was usually one per family, sealed a moment in time and made it temporarily solemn. Families had albums with stiff black paper pages that held faces of past relatives, parents when young, ancestors in strange clothing, their faces stiff with formality. That was where photographs went when they returned from the developer and had been culled to single out the ones suitable for posterity.

Otherwise photography was an art of black and white and shadows, practiced by figures under a hood, behind a tripoded camera. Kodachrome was just beginning to take hold in ordinary living and Madison Avenue was bringing a sense of lightness to photographs through advertising. But it would take time before the Polaroid camera came to households with its weird magic and its sense of play, and even then each of its photos was twenty-five cents apiece. That wasn’t small change in those days and the instant photo never really gained a true foothold.

But now taking a picture is like blinking. We do it rapidly and almost without thought and because we do it so often, some of them are bound to be okay. We peer at our own faces through the lens on our phones and snap; the camera is becoming our mirror. We make our own postcards when we travel and put them on social media instead of buying stamps. We bear witness at crime scenes and disasters. We are all photographers now.

And because of that, we all pay attention in a way that we didn’t in the past. We’re attuned to the beauty of the world, the drama of everyday life, the unintentional humor that emerges on the streets. We see, we stop, we record, and then we keep walking with another image stored on a piece of plastic that holds a minute computer.

Once pundits envisioned untold amounts of leisure that the ordinary person would enjoy in the coming century--and we do. But we snatch our freedom in tiny chunks and in that little segment of time, for a second or two, we are, all of us, leisured people making art.