If the greatest achievements of our ancestors could be defined by their legacy of fine arts and literature, what would we have to feel proud about? Would it be as the progenitors of the latest all-singing, all-dancing camera-phone?
The image, moving or still, is an important part of our identity. Photography has moulted and changed shape over the years. So has our relationship with it – from the ceremony associated with posing for a photographer we have come down to relentless posturing for online bragging.
Photography is no longer the domain of a professional with specialist equipment. We point, shoot and leave. But this may be the first time we are actually experiencing behavioural changes related to our love for the image.
An unfettered access to the camera has made it all right to be visually verbose. Restraint is for wimps, says the gadget in the hand. Go ahead and shoot! screams the sleek built-in camera button. This is why worshippers raise their hands to take a picture of religious idols and rituals rather than in devotion.
Or why guests don’t mind making the event’s hired photographer redundant by getting in the way and clicking away merrily with their own phones. Or, more seriously, filming accidents and crimes rather than helping the victims.
But has the camera-phone also made us less aware of the risks of mindless posing?
‘Death by selfie’ has become a recurring theme in many news articles this year, especially in India, which topped the list of such incidents in 2015.
In January, three college students in Mumbai died on the spot when they got too close to a moving train for a selfie. A teenager accidentally shot himself while posing for a selfie with his father’s loaded pistol in Pathankot in May. Six youngsters were swept away by the Ganga this past week while trying to rescue their friend who had slipped into the rain-swollen river for a selfie in Kanpur.
Cyber-bullying took a murky turn in Tamil Nadu recently when a girl was driven to suicide after she was tagged in a Facebook camera-phone photo that had been morphed in an obscene manner went viral.
The ubiquitous camera-phone may have started pandering to both personal voyeurism and an inflated sense of self-worth, but the role of imaging equipment in the public sphere needs to be taken more seriously.
The recent slaying of a young techie at the Nungambakkam railway station in Chennai showed all too tragically, the disadvantages of not having surveillance cameras in the area. The camera is an invaluable tool in fields as diverse as crime-fighting, telemedicine and geographical mapping.
And yet, we seem to relate to it only as a means of personal advertising; for an image of ourselves we’d live – or die – to take.
