Tell me this hasn’t happened to you: You are driving along an Upper Valley road in broad daylight, and a bear — no, let’s say three, a mother and two cubs — emerge from the woods to cross the road in front of your car.
For safety’s sake, let’s say that you are not the driver but a passenger, so your first instinct is to reach for your phone or the camera sitting on the back seat. There is no traffic and the bears are crossing slowly, but more than wonder or joy with this phenomenon, you feel anxiety because you are afraid that the bears will vanish before you can take their picture.
And now, having volunteered for this hypothetical exercise, you fear you are about to be indicted in a rant against social media because we both know that, had you been successful, you would have texted or emailed the bear picture to your sister in Cincinnati.
But that’s not where I am headed, not exactly.
I’ve been in that car and reached for my camera, or cursed aloud when I realized I had left it at home. And to what end these pictures? To capture a moment and freeze it for immortality?
I am both puzzled and intrigued by the ways that digital imagery has changed everyday behavior.
My grandchildren will grow up in a culture that knows nothing about the thrill of unwrapping a package of film and loading it into a camera. They will never know the discrimination natural to a photographer limited to 12 or 24 or 36 shots, never know the judgment required to measure those precious shots out like sips of water in a desert. They will never know the excitement of waiting for prints to arrive in the mail from Rochester, N.Y.
A turning point in my own life came when Fotomat was so ubiquitous that I fell to the lure of same-day prints. What I remember most is disappointment because I inevitably raced through a roll of film, wasting most of them to have the instant gratification of one or two prints.
But here’s the paradox. I love digital imagery and love the amazing cameras engineered for smartphones. I love the excitement of GoPro footage and the wonder of a drone filming our house and woods in different seasons. I love taking pictures of my grandchildren at their soccer games or alpine races, love taking still shots when I’ve hiked to a summit; and I love being able to share these pictures electronically with family and friends. I cherish the freedom of taking image after image without waste, knowing I can easily delete my redundancies and failures.
Many years before the dawn of the digital age, I had a preview of this feeling when I asked a photographer for National Geographic how he managed to take such wonderful pictures. “It’s easy,” he replied. “The magazine gives me all the film I want. I shoot and shoot and send it all in for them to sort out.”
The world of digital photography is wonderfully egalitarian. When I was young, taking quality pictures required time and money, and access to a darkroom was beyond the reach of average citizens. I was lucky; my wife might say I was “obsessive,” but to me photography was an art. Today there are certainly artists with cameras, but there is less art to the common experience. Taking pictures has become like gathering news, immediate and narrative, and it relies heavily on context and caption.
Anyone with a cellphone can instantly record street scenes and share them broadly. There are some downsides to this development, but for the most part we are better off when common citizens have tools to foil censors and tyrants.
Getting back to those bears on the road, I worry that in the scramble to record, we sometimes miss the dazzle and wonder of the very thing we are trying to record. Everyone who has been to a graduation in the last 20 years knows what I mean, and none of us are immune to this virus. Once I saw the sun set in Key West, but sadly it was through the lens of a camera. What I saw then I can revisit again and again by scrolling through files on my laptop, but I can only imagine what that sunset would have been like without the camera — colors smeared across the entire horizon, the slap of waves against the pillars of the wharf and the cries of gulls overhead, the smell of creosote rising from the planks beneath my feet. We like to say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I think sometimes it’s the other way around.
Pictures frame experience, and often in the process they reduce and stylize it into something else. How quickly a toddler learns to pose or mug ironically when you lift your phone for a picture, and how frustrating that can be when you hope to capture something more.
My wife and I hang family photographs on the walls of our bedroom; they include droll pictures of ancestors in tweed and gingham, formal but more relaxed pictures of our parents, our children smiling from their adolescence and later from their weddings, and now our grandchildren in school photos that we can refresh each year. Together they tell a family story, but each one tells at best a partial truth. Sometimes that’s all we need to prompt a memory, but it’s important to realize that the memory is already there and the photograph merely opens the door.
There is no straight and narrow through the world of digital photography, and I have to admit that the challenge and my own failures are sometimes funny. Every year I stumble into one particular trap when winter settles in with a deep blanket of snow. In my peripheral vision I notice a brilliant flash of color rising from the snow into an apple tree, a cardinal with his mate visiting our feeders. I grab my camera and fit it with a zoom lens to capture this breathtaking sight of vivid color against a background of snow.
My instincts are too powerful to resist even though I know that no matter what, I’m doomed to be disappointed. But there is a silver lining here: After I download the pictures, perfect duplicates to the ones I took the year before and the year before that, I have paid my dues. After that I am free to watch the cardinals with nothing but my eyes.
Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford. He can be reached at jon.stableford@gmail.com.