Friday, December 19, 2003
Living in the Digital World
I didn’t fully understand what it meant to be living in the digital age until I got to know the digital camera. Now everything is different. Reality has new dimensions.
I suspect that Christmas is the season when most men do their self-gratification shopping. When I get a little tired shopping for other people, I refresh myself by looking for what I want. This year I’m in the market for a digital camera. Several of my friends recently got digital cameras, and I’ve had an opportunity to try them out. These gadgets are magical. You just nudge the zoom switch and press the shutter button again and again, and then you have lots of photos that you can transfer from your memory card into the hard-drive of your computer in a few minutes. There you can organize, crop, and alter them. And since there’s no film to worry about wasting, they can accumulate without limit.
My first batch were photos of various objects that can be found in my office—a stuffed cloth rainbow trout, for instance; a painting by my younger brother; rows of books; pens and pencils; a door knob; some sea shells. All of these objects had been sleeping in my office for years, waiting for the camera to startle them into waking life.
Despite the miracles it performs, the digital camera is fundamentally a toy. With it, you can indulge every visual whim. A friend of mine who recently went to Europe with his new compact digital camera shot a photo of every drink and every cup of coffee he had during his stay. He said he merely wanted to test his camera under a variety of lighting conditions, but I don’t know. One of those shots is now his screensaver.
And really, what’s to keep someone from building a photographic record of any seemingly trivial aspect of daily life? Online at photo album sites like Picturetrail.com, you can find expressions of almost any non-pornographic image-obsession. One woman displays a collection of every birthday cake she has made for her children and nieces and nephews. One man shows photos of every Chevy Camaro he’s ever seen. With the digital camera, it is possible to be exhaustive. You could take a portrait of yourself every day of your life, or every hour of every day. You could take photos of people’s shoes as they walk along city streets. I’m reminded of how another friend of mine, during a year-long stay in one of our nation’s great cities, took photographs of lost gloves—gloves on sidewalks, gloves on steps, gloves in booths at diners, a glove in the teeth of a passing dog. Why not? Storage space is not a factor. You aren’t paying for film. Mistakes are trivial. If you don’t like an image, you can easily alter it, or you can zap it and replace it. And a whole series of photos, let’s say three thousand close-up pictures exploring the various shapes of the human nose, can have a monumental effect. It’s suddenly the epic of the nose, an adventure in nostrils.
In an image-saturated culture, where images are too often the tools of oppressive powers, we see mostly what we’re supposed to see. The digital camera can give us our world back, if we use it wisely—and I don’t mean sparingly. To learn to see again entails inviting the accidental into our field of view. Throw away the script and follow your desire. The world is teeming with doorknobs and newels and elbows and eyeballs. Take a tour of your office or your bedroom. Track down and photograph every dust bunny in your basement. Once you’ve discovered your way around your own life, you’ll feel like raising your fist into the air, clutching your digital camera, and shouting, “I’m alive! Everything is alive!” Maybe you’ll feel what an artist feels, the exhilarating sense of a new responsibility to look at things afresh.