Cell phone or camera?
Unbelievable but true: on social media now mobile wins.
Spontaneity wins, immediacy wins. The instant you can capture in an instant wins.
We are Cowboys of a modern Wild West. In our holsters we have our inseparable Smartphone and it survives in the clash at the snap, who has the fastest hand and the quickest eye to visualize the best shot and count the most Likes. But it’s not the quality that wins, at least not on social; it’s the “I’m always there” and the resulting “I’m attached to you.”
The Like, the pursuit of “pleasure.” I have often wondered: why is there this growing need to be seen in every moment, in everything we do? To look better than we are by covering ourselves with skin smoothing filters that erase the signs of aging?
Perhaps it is because we feel we are the protagonists of a story, the story of our lives, and like actors in a Web Series, we must always look good and glossy.
Danny Boodman T.D. Lemon Nineteen Hundred, in The Legend Of The Pianist On The Ocean, said, “You’re not really screwed as long as you have a good story saved and someone to tell it to.”
And that’s the point, to have someone to tell about our life, our achievements, our thoughts. The point is to have an audience to watch our Series, because being “followed,” makes us feel more important, less alone. More interesting, less trivial. The big stars of our small screen. And here we are, always ready to tell something about ourselves and count the Likes.
I stop and think about the children of this generation. And then I think back to when I was a little girl myself and would go through my mom’s drawer to see photos of my parents when they were young. What a thrill to flip through those photos, printed in different sizes, on different papers; some glossy, some matte, some rough, some yellowed. They were photos I had flipped through hundreds of times by now, but I would look at them again in the hope that, by accident, from some corner, a new one would pop up that I had never seen. But no, because there were few of them after all. It was not easy to use analog cameras, you had to know their mechanisms, know how to set them up and hope that all the assessments were correct because there was no monitor to reveal the scene to us.
No.
There was the electricity of not having certainty, there was the anticipation of development, and there were those last moments when, at the checkout counter, you handed in your number (or name) and waited for a white envelope with the still-warm shots.
Like freshly baked brioches.
And in my heart a little voice said, “Let’s hope there are lots of good ones.”
And so out of 24 or 36 photos on a roll of film, if you were lucky, you had 10 that ended up in the scrapbook. The others in the drawer of shame.
All kidding aside, getting immortalized was not as natural and everyday as it is today. It was almost an event. For those of you who were in high school in the 1990s, you will remember that at the end of the year there was the class photo and it remained the only memory with which to see the faces of your classmates again.
Or, going even further back, just think of the photos of grandmothers, they can be counted on the tips of your fingers. They are few, rare, but they have immense value, and if you close your eyes, that photo in the silver frame, you still remember it.
And then I think back to the children of those who have had Facebook profiles for a few years. When they grow up and want to see pictures of their parents when they were young, they will probably be overwhelmed by a Tsunami of selfies-how will they choose a picture with which to remember us? How much will they know about our lives by looking at our profiles and rewinding the tape of time? And how many fantasies and mysteries do we have about our parents’ lives instead?
I don’t know whether it is better to watch everything or to imagine the stories of the past.
Whether it is better to watch a Web Series or read a book.
Whether it is better to take a Selfie or a Professional Portrait.
They are all choices that give different emotions so none is better or worse than the other.
What is certain is that the arrival of digital has changed the approach to photography a great deal, and with the following advent of Social and Smartphones, there has been another unexpected change.
But as the Web Series we are most passionate about teach us, not everything should be told in the first episode. So, now the theme song and, in the next, the second episode.
Anna Antonelli