Blog Entry Number 4

A picture is worth a thousand words... but does it really represent reality? We all take pictures... family gatherings, birthdays, holidays, vacations...but we never stop to think of it as documenting our life. I have literally thousands of pictures and yet never realized I was making a story, a documentation of my life. We take pictures for so many reasons. Whether it is to remember a funny time, keep our relatives up to date of our lives, or just to add to our collection. We are capturing the real and presenting it to those who want to see it. But is it really the real? Do pictures really capture all that happened at that moment in time? I would argue that it does not. When we look at a family picture, we don’t see all the hassle that went on to get everyone together and to smile and look nice. We don’t see all the fighting that probably took place, the baby crying, and the frustrated parents. All we see is one happy family standing in a picture. It is a representation of what we WANT to be real; a sort of fantasy family. “Our memory is never fully ‘ours’, nor are the pictures ever unmediated representations of our past” (Family Snaps, pg 14). It’s that picture perfect family that everyone strives for but in reality there is no such thing. Only those who were there can faintly remember what actually went on, but as time goes on that fades away too and all we remember is that picture perfect family.

The camera has become part of the events now. “There is no attempt to conceal the process of picture-taking – participants present themselves directly to the camera in an act of celebratory co-operation” (Family Snaps, pg 4). Hardly ever do we go somewhere that we are not bound to be capture on camera. Everyone wants to preserve the event as long as they can. And now with the introduction of the digital camera, people can take thousands of pictures at a time, go back and look at them and choose what to keep. We now have this ability to edit the pictures on the spot to get the best image. But is this then a representation of the real? Again I’ll argue against it. How are we representing what really went on at the moment in time when we have deliberately posed for the picture, taken it many times and then gone and edited it??? Back before digital cameras the pictures used to capture reality because you could not change or edit the picture. They told a story, showed reality and truth. The pictures were chosen carefully because a roll of film only had so many pictures whereas with digital cameras now you can take thousands of pictures.

But the camera is good in representing our past. It is here that we “gaze at layers of our past being” (Family Snaps, pg 2). We don’t really remember much of when we were younger, but looking at picture albums (from a time when digital cameras were not around especially), we can begin to piece together our past. We see pictures of family events, family members that maybe have passed away, things we did when we were younger etc. Although it does not represent the entire past, it gives us a sense of who we are. I’ll look back at pictures from when I was a baby all the way until the age I am now, and that is how I put together my past. I remember things based on the photos I see and it helps me realize who I am today. “We invest our own album with the weight of childhood experience, searching it for information, pouring into it our unfulfillable desires” (Family Snaps, pg 2). It helps you to see who you are and where you came from. Without the camera, we would not have this ability to remember the past as well as this.

Not only does photographs help us to remember, but it allows us to keep our relatives that live far away up to date on our lives. Many of my family members have blogs which they post images of their new babies, events and different chapters in their lives. It allows us to somewhat experience it with them from a far. Pictures are also used to help prove someone was somewhere, as well as the images help to make sense of the world around us. “Snapshots are part of the material with which we make sense of our wider world” (Family Snaps, pg 10).

Many times we add captions to our photos when we put them in an album. We talked in class about how a photograph needs to have some sort of caption to explain the context because everyone will have a different interpretation based on their own subjective opinion. Adding a caption to photographs helps to make it a little easier for others who are looking at the picture to understand what was going on at that time and see the image the way the photographer wants it to be seen. Adding captions to our old photographs helps also give more context to our life because it helps explain what we are seeing and explain that moment in time. I could look at my baby pictures and interpret it how I would see it; however my mom may have written a caption to it that gives me further insight into her view of the event since she was there at the time.

They say pictures are worth a thousand words and can help to remind us of the past. Not necessarily of exactly what happened at the time, but we can use these images to piece together from our memory the rest. With every picture taken, you are adding to the documentation of your life.