Hey everyone!
Inspired by a single phrase from Hanya Yanagihara’s confronting1 novel, The People in the Trees, Thích Nhất Hạnh’s journals from 1962-1966, Fragrant Palm Leaves, and my mom’s visit to Brasil this essay examines contemporary photo and video sharing.
I hope you enjoy it!
Blessings e beijos do Rio,
Jodi
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I’ve been thinking a lot about photos lately. No longer being “active” on social media has recalibrated what I take pictures of, and how often and with who I share them. But it’s not this transition that’s provoked my recent preoccupation. Like any half-decent existential trigger, it’s my mom.
Her photography shenanigans are a thing, and while she was here became a running joke. Her habit of furiously reaching for her phone and proceeding to take a gazillion photos of the same subject, from the same perspective, garnered all kinds of corrective urges on my part. I told her to enjoy the view, reminded her that my (photographer) husband was with us. Sometimes, I just straight up pointed at his camera 🤡. Still, even as her eyes welled up with something just shy of relief, within a minute she was right back at it.
Quantity is certainly one way to think about our idiosyncratic preferences and turn-offs when it comes to taking photos. To some people’s dismay and others’ fixation, when I got my first digital camera in 2003 it quickly became my new appendage. From soccer field sidelines and pre-drinks to city bus stops and the first day of university, it was not unusual for me to have an entire Facebook album (or 60 photos) for a single day! Knowing, at the time, how little my grandparents had documented from their youth, I embraced all and any new means available to me. My growing inventory appeared to me as a Godsend.
Because photos and videos play such an important role in supplementing our limited and oh-so fallible memories, philosopher Regina Rini refers to them as our “epistemic backstop”. This “backstop” of ours used to require patience, focused attention, and limited resources. Now, it simply requires a mindless swipe and tap. It’s instantaneous. We concurrently experience and record and our once-upon-a-time backstop has become our synchronized go-to.
Like anything, the zeal with which we reach for our phones has its pros and cons. As I see it, it’s our value systems, interpretations, and behaviours that yield meaning, not things in and of themselves. The nostalgic, sentimental part of me loves having my 18,970 photos and videos to look back on. But kinda like how we can overkill an inside joke by repeating it too many times, our impulse to remember can be inadvertently alienating. In People of the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara nuances this point perfectly:
“…and we observered the three men telling one another about the experience they’d just witnessed, all of them speaking so fast that it seemed they were trying to expunge themselves of the memory rather than cement it.”
When I take photos and videos, I want to remember where I was and who I was with. I hope that this little piece of media will encapsulate how I felt. So later, when I scroll back through the days, months, years, and decades, I feel an array of emotions. I feel a tender sense of communion and knowability, I feel seen and connected. Loved. Yet I also feel at odds and at a loss. I see myself, and I see who I was. Sometimes, I don’t recognize myself even as I look back at the same smile, with the same slightly crooked, upper left incisor. All of it is wholly true.
Without the added whammy of a bursting iCloud storage bolstering an increasingly distributed and material self, writing in 1962 Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh describes this dizzying feeling:
“I began to feel my body turning to smoke and floating away. I became a faint wisp of a cloud. I had always thought of myself as a solid entity, and suddenly I saw that I’m not solid at all. This wasn’t philosophical or even an enlightenment experience. It was just an ordinary impression, completely ordinary. I saw that the entity I had taken to be “me” was really a fabrication. My true nature, I realized, was much more real, both uglier and more beautiful than I could have imagined.”
My personal experience has taught me that ego-dissolving practices are part of the Good Life, that attachment is a myth, and impermanence is a blessing. If freedom, as philosopher José Ortega y Gasset postulates, is less about constitutive identity and more about being “unable to install oneself once and for all in any given being” it seems to me that not trying to remember everything is an existential imperative. But it’s also a huge challenge when we’re incentivized and rewarded for remembering, sharing, consuming, and reliving more and more of our past.
While deleting traditional social media accounts has personally helped me in this regard, full disclosure: I have over 1,000 photos and videos from my mom’s 31-day visit here 🤪. And while I love and feel reassured that so much of our time together is saved in the bowels of my iCloud, more often than not it will be a select few I choose to revisit. The ones I’ve shared here, the couple I’ll frame. Knowing the entire inventory is there gives me some peace of mind that it happened, that I can lay the hammock and retrace so many of our footsteps. And I’ll do just that as I try to simultaneously follow Thích Nhất Hạnh’s words of wisdom: “To live, we must die every instant.”
My little book review is available here on Goodreads.