Kaitrin Acuna
One part of history that Abbot mentions in "Photography at the Crossroads" is the fantastic era when near everyone was able to afford images of themselves. What was typically left to the wealthy, people suddenly had access to. You could know what your sibling or mother looked like twenty years ago, without the costly skill of a professional painter. And to an even greater extent, these images were "speaking likenesses." There wasn't a painter who could match the precision of a daguerreotype, in any quick amount of time at least.
This revolution of commercial portrait photography has allowed us to see our great-great grandparents and distant relatives. We can marvel at what physical facial features we shared, and revisit exact locations where they were photographed. I was able to do this in Ireland, and photographed places my great-great grandmother had visited. This access to personal visual records is incredible, and I wish there were more photographs (or if there were existent videos!) of my ancestors from those times.
It often occurs to me how my own eventual great grandchildren will have this same experience, but ten-fold of what I have had. Even with media like Facebook, where I've put images and stray thoughts at least weekly since I was sixteen. I often imagine what it would be like, to have the same arsenal of thoughts and musing from my ancestors. How entertaining and amazing of an experience that would be, to know what my great grandmother thought on a certain day when she was sixteen years old, all the way up to her oldest years.
The huge abundance of images and video will be phenomenal as well. Our posterity will know how we looked at each year of our lives. They'll know us from formal pictures, and far more from casual snapshots. And they'll know our voices from our videos. We are in an ever continuing era of available photography--but how greatly I wish there was more 200 years ago for us to look back upon.
1 comment:
Are you ever worried about storing so much of your life on the internet instead of in material form? Instead of writing your thoughts on paper, or developing your pictures? Or do you find that the internet is a better storage unit for such information? I'm personally torn on the issue. As much as I like all of my physical tokens, I am prone to losing and ruining them. I can store more information on the internet, but just as easily lose an account password.
My grandfather recently started using the internet. He's one of those amateur historian/genealogist types, collects antique photographs, postcards, etc. It's strange to see him running around with his digital camera, frantically transferring the pictures on his memory card to the desktop of his computer. He also saves pictures from the internet onto disks. I wonder what he thinks this technology does for him? After decades of collecting material images, he surprisingly seems to trust the computer as a storage unit (though he still relies on physical disks and memory cards). While his collection has grown in size, it has been further privatized, and is now less accessible to other people.
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