"Don't Take a Picture - Remember This in Your Heart"

I was listening to my old Indigo Girls’ Swamp Ophelia cassette on my way to work this morning and the traffic was so bad that I’ve finished playing the whole album just halfway to my destination. Dead Man’s Hill was the second to the last track, and hearing it again after a long time made me realize that these lines ring true so much more now than when they first struck me some 12 years ago, when digital photo albums, blogs and all forms of messaging channels apart from telephony were still unheard of.

“Don’t you write it down, remember this in your head,
Don’t take a picture, remember this in your heart,
Don’t leave a message, talk to me face-to-face.”

In an age when almost everybody owns a camera of whatever form and quality that can be carried all the time, and has limitless capacity to hold pictures – we’ve changed in the way we’ve recorded our memories. On the one hand, we can no longer complain about missing to take a souvenir of a family outing or about lacking proof of that run-in with a favorite celebrity, and that’s great. I remember regretting not having any pictures from my college graduation except for the one sold by official photographers because we did not load the film properly. And even if I was in my classmates’ pictures, I couldn’t get copies from them because they’ve lost the negatives, and some of them I didn’t see anymore after the graduation. These things won’t be a problem now even if you don’t take out your own camera from your pocket. You can easily rely on others to email or Bluetooth you theirs or, well, just access their Multiply account. Not assigning yourself as official photographer, after all, assures that you’re always in the pictures.

On the other hand, I feel that with us spending so much time snapping away, making sure we have every minute covered, that we’ll have cool photos on our websites – there is that irony that we may actually be taking time away from really embracing the purity of the moment, from breathing in the sights and sensations of a new place, from enjoying just the music at a concert, or from cherishing the company of the people we’re with. Sometimes, we can get carried away and over-document that it’s as if we traveled just to take pictures (though, photographers do that). Or sometimes, interestingly, the documentation of the activity (often referred to as “camwhoring”) has become the activity itself.