Last week, I ran through all the digital photos I have taken since 2001 to help with a slideshow for a friend’s wedding. It quickly became apparent how changes in technology, specifically sharing services, have dramatically shifted the types of photos that we take, and therefore changed how we shape the memories they capture.
Since I started actively photographing friends and important life moments, we have gone through three major revolutions in technology that have dramatically altered the types of photos we can and do capture.
There was the era before digital cameras and social networks when photos were natural, candid and not posed—what I will call the “Era of Obliviousness.” Then there was the era when, thanks primarily to Facebook and cheap digital cameras, photos became posed and often clustered in albums around groups of people—what I will call the “Era of Sharing.” And now, we are in the “Era of Attention,” when taking photos is less about capturing reality and more about creating content to show off to others to drive attention and feedback.
The Era of Obliviousness
I started carrying a digital camera around with me in 2001, which is where my photo history really starts. From about 2001 to 2005, digital cameras certainly existed, but there weren’t many high-quality, highly portable models, and they were relatively expensive. The expectations about photo sharing were also very different. In the pre-Facebook era, there wasn’t a graph wired up to share photos through, so people didn’t really expect the photos that you took to end up anywhere. Perhaps you would email them, or even print them out.
As a result, most photos from this era are unposed candids. People ignored or didn’t notice cameras, and so photos reflected people interacting together in a way that you would have a very hard time capturing today—obliviously laughing, playing silly games or in quiet moments. There are also almost zero portraits or shots of people alone and aware of the camera, and zero selfies. To take an explicit solo photo of someone, not to mention yourself, would have been socially awkward and generally pointless.
There are also many photos from that Era of Obliviousness that are unflattering enough that they just could not have been taken in a post-sharing world, both because I wouldn’t have had the guts to take them in this day and age and the people around would have noticed the camera and blocked them.
The Era of Sharing
Cheaper digital cameras and social networking, very clearly feeding off each other, changed everything. The service that changed everything was Facebook, with profile photos and then the Photos product providing the rails where people could express value in sharing photos of their friends and shattering the unacceptability of personal imagery online. There were other photo-sharing services, like Flickr. But Facebook was the primary driver of this wave because the social network had a privacy model which made online photo sharing acceptable, and because features like tagging made sharing photos online relevant and meaningful as compared to simply posting into a void.
Looking at my own photos from about 2005 to 2010, people clearly become more and more aware of the camera, and photos became more formulaic. I took lots of group shots where people are obviously anticipating capturing a shared event together, sometimes with multiple photos in an album. Posing prevailed. There are more photos of individuals, and the selfie starts to appear.
Interestingly, my photo volume actually decreased in this era. I think this is because more of my friends were taking photos in this era, so I felt less of a need to do so all the time.
The Era of Attention
We are now in a third era of digital photos. This one is enabled by camera phones and defined by an expectation that photos are meant to be responded to, liked, shared and commented on.
One important player in this era is Instagram, which has a monolithic and deterministic feed that drives people to take and share a relatively low volume of high-quality individual images. These images are a game of hyper-reality perfection, where users are rewarded by a broad audience in the form of likes.
The other important dynamic of the third age of photos is messaging. It’s not about sharing the perfect shot, but a random, intimate one that makes the person receiving it feel special. (Example: Snapchat.)
In the Era of Sharing, photos were taken to be shared widely. Now, people take them to share them with specific audiences. Everything is posed, all the time. Albums are dead, and people try to distill an experience or thought into single images with the maximum return per unit of attention.
Today, looking back at the images I once captured, it is clear that something has been lost by the dawn of digital photography and an evolving set of photo-sharing services. I miss the truly candid moments that were captured in prior eras.
But I also believe that new technology, specifically even cheaper and more ubiquitous cameras and recording capabilities, will continue to unleash new behaviors we can’t fully predict.
Perhaps we’ll live in a world where we simply expect everything will be captured and will be much more natural and candid again. Or perhaps more ubiquitous cameras and recording will make us more manicured at all times.
Either way, looking back at my first fourteen years of digital photography, what is clear is that history is not only in the eye of the beholder, but a reflection of the beholder’s technology.