Philosophical Musings on Photography and Life

During a recent trip to Europe, I discovered in the fullest sense the allure of digital photography. I have owned a digital camera for nearly a year now, but only during this recent trip did I begin to exploit its full potential. Doing so caused me to consider the concept of photography as a whole, of which digital photography merely provides the most apparent and brazen examples.
The aspect of the digital photography revolution that impressed me most deeply was the careless ease with which it is possible to take multiple photographs and to subsequently discard them if they are an unflattering representation, an inaccurate picture of the memory that you want to keep, or simply taking up space on the memory card that you would rather grant to some other snapshot. I found myself taking dozens, even hundreds of pictures, most of which I would never have taken had I been using the old style hand advanced camera given to me by my uncle, the camera that witnessed the dawn of my photographic experiences. I took pictures of nearly everything I saw; architectural features, buildings, people, amusing street signs and advertisements. I took dozens of angles, styles, and patterns of light, spurred on by the fact that a single memory card held nearly five hundred photographs. Why did I take these pictures? I have asked that question many times since I returned, and the most accurate answer that I can find is this: I felt compelled.
I have since come to believe that what is true of digital photography is true also of traditional film photography, mitigated only by considerations of weight, storage space, and cost that are not present with the technology of a digital camera. This led me to question the photographic impulse itself, and to try to unravel precisely which human emotions and desires lead modern man to try to document everything on film. Nearly every tourist (a human being undertaking a new and unique experience) desires in some fashion to document, to record, to take some part of their experience away and make it permanently their own. This is seen most blatantly in the souvenir industry, in which tourists feel nearly compelled to bring something back with them; to demonstrate in a tangible fashion that they actually were at a particular place, they actually did have a particular experience and have a tangible thing to prove it, both to themselves and to others. This phenomenon is illustrated as well, and perhaps more applicably to the current subject, in the famous “kilgore was here” and similar graffiti by which people more or less permanently record their presence at a given location.
Martin Heidegger, in his essay The Question Concerning Technology, presents a concept that he believes to be vital to the essence of the modern world, one that he calls “the standing-reserve.” Heidegger presents this idea as the philosophy by which modern technology operates, and the way in which it differs from pre-modern technological conceptions. The standing-reserve is the way in which technological invention, nature, and ultimately mankind is harnessed, abstracted, objectified, and put into storage as a sort of energy reserve powering the various activities of the human race. Modern technology, according to Heidegger, “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.” This artificial conception of nature dominates the world of modern technology and human action. One specific example used by Heidegger in his essay, however, bears a unique relevance to the subject at hand. After explaining the way in which the Rhine is not just tapped as an energy source (as does the water wheel) but is actually damned up and converted entirely to the purpose of the production and storage of energy, he makes a further argument regarding the condition of the river after this operation is performed. He observes, “But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.”
It seems that this is the motivation behind the photographic culture. Pictures are taken to create memories, to share experiences with others, to hold onto a piece of various life experiences. Primarily, however, pictures are taken because society demands it. We take the pictures, posing for them, editing out the redeye, and the poor angles, and the non-photogenic images. We tell our stories, editing them, polishing them, creating the image that we want to publicize. None of what is taken away, however, has any real correlation to the actual experience that it purportedly represents. We travel, take our trips and vacations, then we return, develop our photographs, and create the experience that we share with our friends and relatives; one entirely different from the experience that we actually had.
This obsession with photography is a direct result of the type of culture described so eloquently by Heidegger. The taking of photographs is an attempt to make that particular corner of the world ones own; to capture and posses a small piece of it in an intensely personal, objectified fashion. To visit Berlin and see the Brandenburg gate is merely to have a memory and an experience. To take a picture of the Brandenburg gate-or many pictures, creating many different images-is to capture and box in a small piece of this object, to abstract it and possess it in a way that memory never can. To take something away in one’s memory is to participate in something that many others in the world have also done; to take pictures of it is to capture a part of the essence of that thing and carry it away hostage.
The community that is created by photography and the attendant sharing of prepackaged, polished, artificial stories is one of possession and personal ownership. It does not share an object of common culture with others in a community that either has or could posses the same experience. Instead, it takes a piece of a common entity and makes it the object of personal ownership. The experience, and more importantly the place, that the photograph represents is taken away, objectified, stored up, and forced to stand in reserve, waiting to be brought out at will and used; not to share a true experience, but rather as a demonstration of experiences that have been had, owned, by you as a person.
I stop short of a broad condemnation of the art of photography, because there are ways in which photography can and does serve the furtherance of beauty and of human experience, just as there are ways in which tourism can do the same. However, photography must be undertaken, as all things, self-consciously and reflectively. To act in an awareness of the purpose, which is the preservation of an experience and not laying claim to a particular corner of reality as a personal possession , is essential.