Digital Cameras are the logical point at which the history of cameras has concluded (for now). The history of cameras has been one of increasing ease of use and increasing market penetration. This has had, and is having, several unintended consequences. I'll name just a few before I get to my main unintended consequence, which is that we can now accurately and precisely track our physical decay and get hysterical about it.
• UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE ONE: Postcards are becoming passe and I wouldn't be surprised if postcard companies were turfing daily. It is so much more "personal" (but probably less artistic) to send someone a digital file of the Louvre, but not just the Louvre, the Louvre defiled by you and your family in Bermuda shorts.
• UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE TWO: Digital pornography, and with it the web, have exploded. Since pornography drives these things we can shortly expect to see (Flickr be damned!) more witless blogs with equally witless graphix. Kind of like this one. ;-)
But my main point is that the digital camera, and the Polaroid camera before it, have entirely changed how we can view ourselves and how we can think of our personal histories. I think that most people my age can remember the moment they first looked at an old movie and realized that everyone in it must be dead. An interesting thing to think, and a thought that would never have been thought (short of a gallery of Papal heroes in a church) before 1814, when the first semi-photograph was taken with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's camera obscura.
And even once cameras made such a thought possible, two forces combined to dilute the impact of the thought. First, photographs were rare. Second, they were formal. These two facts combined to make a photographs iconographic, in some ways outside of the realm of "normal" life. Now, with the quick and easy (and now cheap) digital camera, photographs are are as common as wheat, and chaff.
The rarity of photographs meant that they were primarily taken at milestones of one's life. A wedding, a birthday, generals sitting before battle, perhaps at a funeral. The rarity was also related, of course, to the difficulty of taking a picture. Hard to remember, but you used to have to sit still, very still, and for a while, to get a picture taken. This rarity led to photographs being treated as something akin to paintings. They represented historical eras and events, not so much the people involved. The people involved, even if they were you, tended to look like those actors I mentioned at the top of this article. And because of the rarity and difficulty of taking pictures, pictures tended to be formal and posed.
Formal and posed, do not look "real."
The reality of aging is not pretty, but it does have the advantage of coming on slowly. At my advanced age I can probably do about half of what I could do at age 21 (that goes for athletics, sex, drinking, all the good things!). But the transition was slow, so I haven't really noticed it. However, if I could be transported into my 21 year-old body for just one day, I'd probably come back to my older body and lay it down on the train-tracks in a fit of depression. And my back would get a crick before the train came and I'd probably just go home and drink a bottle of wine. ;-)
Pre-camera, or during the era of the "formal" camera, you were allowed this same mercy of slowness. Although there might be pictures of you at certain milestones of your life, there weren't many of them, they partook a bit of the atmosphere of the stage, and they were planned and posed. Prior to the camera, the average man probably had no graphic representation of himself in his youth. All he had was his marvelously malleable, and riddled, memory. This has all changed.
Now digital pictures are ubiquitous, treated as though they represent reality and, alarmingly, can catch you in poses and states you would never want saved for posterity. A quick search of the Internet will reveal this in spades.
In the formal days you were made-up and posed for photos. Also, photos were in black and white and not particularly high-quality - they lacked a representation of reality. So you could be pretty sure a picture of yourself would present your best side and wouldn't really present you at all. As you get older, the "best side" gets harder to find. Gore Vidal, somewhere, writes an amusing account of how age causes you to know where your mirrors are and even hang them with intent. And to approach them only from flattering angles. The mirror becomes your enemy. As does the camera. And unlike the mirror, the "reflection" from the camera is permanent.
So the digital camera allows us to create, in incidental fashion, a panorama of personal decline. The camera does not allow us to forget what we looked like or what we used to be able to do. It dams the river Lethe. I sometimes wonder if the recent (say 1970s on) obsession with Boomer fitness is related to the fact that Polaroids became ubiquitous at that time.
Man.. I'm gonna have a beer and smash my camera!
