When photography was first invented, the rumour was that the camera trapped a part of your soul in the picture. So the Victorians photographed their dead — dolled them up one last time to take a picture that would serve as their stand-in thereafter. The camera may or may not take away the soul, but it was certain that it could not give life. The resulting photographs seem eerie now; one wonders why the Victorians would choose to remember their dead as the hollow-faced, empty-eyed subjects of the photos, shells whose inhabitants are long gone. What sort of nostalgia would it be to look back not at happy times, but at the aftermath of tragedy? Perhaps that age of epidemic and war acclimatised the people to death in ways that would be unthinkable today.
Photography is the closest we can get to stopping time. The camera is our pause button, the cork we use to stop time from running out. And the photo album is the most potent time machine ever built, one that transports you to a curated past where everything exists as you choose to remember it, one that lets you revisit not just people and places and ages, but the hidden crannies of your own memory and the strange landscape of emotions that lies beyond.
In an age where the photograph is booming — not just as keepsake or art but as news, information, advertising, and a way of gaining social currency — what we choose to photograph reveals a lot about what we value and desire. The general consensus is that the millennial obsession with taking pictures of everything stems from the tendency to over- share on social media, but it may also be a manifestation of our relationship with an increasingly unstable present. When everything around you changes before you can register it, it is tempting to reach into your pocket for your smartphone, click away, and think about it later, even if the subject is as simple as a slice of toast. The selfie may be narcissistic, but it is also a self-portrait that anchors you to a time and place, be it your first holiday abroad or the nightclub you visit every weekend.
A future state
We focus a lot of time and energy into being happy, but these efforts tend to assume happiness as a future state, one that needs to be worked towards. Between nostalgia for the past and the elusive happiness of the future, the present transforms into a transient and rapidly narrowing bridge. When we document something by taking a photo of it, are we not already assigning it to the past by transforming it into a static memory?
Maybe the Victorians were partially right. Maybe instead of taking away a part of the soul the photograph takes away a part of the present. How many times have we anguished over getting the right shot when we should have been enjoying ourselves? Yet, by taking away a part of the present — or as the Victorians believed, a part of the soul, the camera enables it to live on forever. It is up to us to decide if we want to immerse ourselves in our present and risk forgetting it later, or sacrifice some of the present so we can hold on to it.
Although the first option would probably leave us happier, most of us pick the second. As a species we find it difficult to let go of things that make us happy. Perhaps it is an evolutionary survival mechanism hardwired into our brain and enabled by the technology in our hands.
From a luxury only the rich could afford to every smartphone owner’s pastime, the photograph has become the most democratic and accessible form of art; and as much as we share it, it will always remain deeply personal, an intimate glimpse into the scene people choose to pause their lives at.
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