Tonight I started pondering how life might have been different before photography and video. Think about growing up and how you watched your own home videos and flipped through your family’s albums — at least, if you were like me — watching yourself grow. And the familiar startle of seeing yourself as you were or — even more startling — seeing someone close to you as they once were, especially if you hadn’t in a while. I came upon some video snippets from an old point-and-shoot recently. Most of them are terrible — I had a bad habit of mixing up “record” and “stop recording,” so it’s mostly the off moments — but they still brought back years-old realities with alarming clarity. To relive the past in this way is so common now. Before film, people could only do it through writing and painted portraits, and usually only if they were pretty well-to-do.
Imagine early daguerrotypes and photos in the nineteenth century and the earliest films at the beginning of the twentieth — experimental shots of daily life or bawdy silent jokes. How must it have felt to see yourself on film for the first time, for those who had the privilege? I guess they were so involved in the evolution of the medium that it wasn’t shocking, inundated as they were. But remember the first time you ever saw a photo of one of your grandparents young? I dunno … maybe there’s not a point to be made here. I’m thinking aloud (kind of). I just … as much as I sometimes feel that the best art is the oldest and the closest to nature — painting, for example, and music — I adore film. I guess that’s what I really have to say.
I should piece those snippets together sometime.
Wait, I remember the rest. Okay, so imagine BEFORE all of that. Before photos and film were an option at all. Imagine growing up without looking back on yourself. Would our senses of self have been more solid back then? Would we have forgotten more, and maybe for the better? Or has nothing really changed?
I guess not much has changed. After all, letters were written and portraits were painted, and people relived the past that way. But I can’t shake the feeling that staring into the chemical or digital likeness of a person is a sort of magic that reveals something else entirely. Candid moments. Smirks an average painter might have overlooked. Asymmetry. Fear. Joy. I dunno. A few painters captured that, and a few writers, and they were masters. But now it’s so easy.
Then again, now we fake ourselves in photos, too. So what are we looking back on? Two memories. “I looked good then. I remember how I wanted to seem in this photo, but looking back, I know I was exhausted and sad.” Someday will I forget the truth and look back and see only the picture? Should I?
