Recording In Progress

One of the most stressful assignments in a film photography class is the pinhole camera segment. It's a common exercise where you build the camera and then experiment with it to capture photos and develop the image.

My mom saved a cookie tin for me from among the neighborhood Christmas treats she received. After spraying the inside with matte-black spray paint and punching a small hole in the bottom, my camera was ready. In the dark room, I loaded up the makeshift camera with photopaper then left to find an interesting scene nearby to photograph. The tiny hole was covered in electrical tape so that the light wouldn't leak in until I wanted to take the photo.

I found a weird alcove of the art building with shards of pottery all over the ground (it was either the remains of a kiln-firing gone very wrong or it was a postmodern piece examining the effect of art on society). This was surely going to be my masterpiece!

...Well, in my defense, there's no way to focus the pinhole, so you kinda get what you get—and don't be expecting some kind of beautiful, shallow-depth-of-field bokeh-riddled close-up, that's not going to happen with this setup.

This assignment seems to get more stressful as time goes by because from the first time I made a pinhole camera as a teenager to the one I made in college, digital cameras became affordable to the masses, film photography became obsolete among even the hardcore scrapbookers, and the newly ubiquitous digital camera melded into the smartphone and started disappearing altogether. This wild appearance and disappearance of photographic technology meant that within only a few years, my personal expectations of the tech changed drastically.

Digital cameras could do what film cameras (and especially pinhole cameras) could not: give you instant feedback. You had a preview of what your camera was going to produce after snapping the photo. You could review what you captured while still standing in the same place! Digital also started lending a helping hand with auto-focus settings and a few other neat dials and buttons to tweak the kind of output you were looking for. It also doubled, tripled, or eventually infinitely expanded the number of photos you could take, depending on the memory card or built-in storage available.

Contrasted to the pinhole camera, which had a capacity to take one photo per trip to the darkroom (you can't reload it on the fly because the light will destroy whatever you had as well as the new photopaper you would be replacing), how can we even deal with this thing?! It doesn't focus, it doesn't help you compose the shot, it is vulnerable, and you can even do everything right and then ruin it in the dark room during development.

Then again, when I stopped stressing about making the photo turn out the way digital photos did, there were some really cool results:

It seems like as digital photography became easier, cheaper, and more accessible, the quality of my photos sharply declined with that increase of quantity. It's to the point that all of the photos on my phone are basically worthless—certainly in artistic value. They're quick snaps of paragraphs in books that I'll never go back and read; or they're little things I wanted to document. Even when I try really hard to compose my shot, I never go back to review them and I never use them (except in CYBORG_ articles).

I haven't touched film photography in a very long time, so I've lost the skills I used to know well about exposure and shutter speed settings. All of the experimentation-mindset is lost. It's certainly a me-problem, but technology is not without its part in this degradation. In a way it's following the fundamental law of economics: tons of supply + low demand = cheap, cheap, cheap.

Constraints Are Everything

You could insert any technology into Socrates's critique, because all technology abstracts skills and knowledge in order to make something easier, even if only slightly easier. For example, photographs have all kinds of applications: they can be art, they can be aids in documenting history, they can be nostalgic reminders of moments gone by. All of these require some skills—primarily for operating the camera—and as technology continued to improve the camera, we abstracted a lot of those operational skills. Our current smartphones auto-adjust the exposure, detect human faces, attempt to focus on what we most likely want in focus. We have offloaded or "[trusted] to the external" all of those technical skills to the phone camera.

Not to say no one is an artist with their phone camera, but the massive majority of people are not applying the rules of composition and visual design when they take pictures with their phones. If there's something cool they want to capture, there is no penalty for taking a whole bunch of random snaps, because there's little to no cost for each press of the button—no limits to storage, no work needed to develop, nothing to do with images after.

Again, while I am generalizing here, when I see people visiting museums or going to other experiences like a beautiful overlook of a canyon or even going to a concert, I also see the behavior of cheap experiences. If you drive to a canyon, get out of the car, look at the scene through your phone, snapping pictures all the while, then get back in and drive away, did you even see what you were looking at? You "appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing" of what you just experienced. I'm guilty of this. I've gone places and instead of soaking in the experience, knowing this is the only time in my life I'll be there, I waste a majority of the time making sure I "document" everything I see.

It is extremely nice and useful to have a phone camera. It's been a tool for social justice and in checking authority, such as in cases of police brutality. It's convenient to be able to capture mundane things that may be deeply meaningful later, such as moments with loved ones who have now passed on. I'm not at all trying to say that we abandon our phone cameras, but I do think that the ease and abstraction has a cost. What we lose is often what we think we are gaining: memory and experience. Instead of capturing a moment in embodied memory, we put it in our phone. Instead of listening to understand, we offload it to the recording on our phone (or AI or whatever other tech). Instead of feeling, we skip over the breathtaking moments to make sure we get the snap, then move on to the next thing.

While we don't need pinhole cameras to help us appreciate the world around us, we do need constraints, and knowing the cost might help us to remember to introduce that friction and that difficulty. Accepting the loss of digital documentation could be the motivation we need to put that experience back into our own minds and bodies.

I think it's extremely important to not lose touch with our embodied experiences. I know what it's like to temporarily lose my sense of taste, my coordination, my ability to think due to my MS attack, and I find it eerily similar in some ways to be diverting our tactile and visceral experiences into second-hand digital ones. Looking at a canyon through the screen of a phone is the same as eating strawberries without being able to taste them. Taking a picture of a memorial and the plaque explaining its significance is nothing like being present, becoming empathetically involved, feeling the weight of human loss or sacrifice, and being moved by it.

Our bodies may be imperfect; our memories are imperfect; but they are real and transformational. Our minds are already in a state of "recording in progress," as we take in our day and the information we encounter, and we even have automated processes that help us sort through what is important and what isn't. At least for me, I've noticed that the more I trust myself and my body to capture and record, the less I need to record digitally. A few, well-planned, intentional digital artifacts are plenty to remind me of what happened and that small, incomplete digital representation prompts my body to revisit the smells, sights, or textures of the experience.