Smartphones, Photography and our Capacity to Look

A few years ago, my partner and I were in the Musée D'Orsay in Paris, home to some of the most significant and most famous and super-popular artworks of the Impressionism, Postimpressionism, and much more besides. I had been there before. In fact, I still remember visiting in 1987, just after its famous and controversial grand opening. Things had changed. We didn't take our smartphones that day, but soon after arriving in the hallowed d'Orsay halls, we realized we were in the minority. It did not take long for us to see that the vast majority of attendees viewed the paintings only through their smartphones. And I don't mean following a museum guide app: instead, I mean they were moving from work to work only to photograph it. We began to feel a bit alienated, as if we were one of the only ones who wanted to look at the works of art, as they were, “in the flesh”, to experience them directly.

I am sure we can all recall a recent visit to a museum, gallery, or landmark where the visitors seemed more captivated by taking photographs on their phones than actually soaking in the wonders in front of them. This new phenomenon begs the question: what have smartphones done to photography, or more fundamentally, how we look at ourselves and our world? In this article, I want to explore how the smartphone has given us a new lens on our reality and offers some insights into how we can ensure we don't lose track of our ability to look at the amazing world around us. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it, goes the old saying. Is it that the capacity to take pictures has begun to dull our capacity to see.?

Scanning works by Helen Frankenthaler at the Parrish Art Museum: at left, “Provincetown Window” (1963-64); top right, “Provincetown” (1964); and bottom right, “Summer Scene: Provincetown” (1961). Via New York Times

In general, analogue photography, because of its limits, made you look, and discern, consider, and choose. It made you reflect on looking and seeing. Conversely, with smartphones, the only limit to your image-taking is the amount of memory on your device. This unfathomable quantity risks, however, becoming like a word that is repeated ad infinitum until all meaning has been drained out of it.

If these people were so digitally-minded, did they know or stop to consider that all the works are available in seemingly endless iterations on Google Image? I can imagine it might be a good idea to take a picture of a rare work if you were so inclined, but this is not what they were doing, they were taking pictures of all the celebrity works of art.

And it without any scrutiny of the actual work. This begs the question about how much people exposed themselves to these works. Did they then go back to their hotel to look at the pictures they took? Is this not so patently absurd and self-defeating? Or maybe they never referred to the pictures again. They were just there as records as an assurance to their Twitter or Instagram followers that they had been to a famous museum in Paris.

It did not take long after witnessing so many people doing this to make us feel increasingly uncomfortable. We left, not out of aesthetic exhaustion, but to avoid any more of this absurdity.

The Highs and Lows of Digital Photography

Was this a generational thing we asked ourselves? Were we out of touch? Analogue kids in a digital world? No, I don’t think so. In as early as 1929, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, wrote that "We have become prosthetic gods". This is now more resonant than ever. You only need to think of the feeling of symbolic amputation when you have left your phone at home or in the car or lost it. Without certain electronic functions, like phone connectivity, we feel unmoored, uprooted, lost without access to the Internet.

Nir Eyal, in Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, states that "79 per cent of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every morning."

Yet, as Nicholas Carr asserts in the Wall Street Journal, "As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens." We may have become prosthetic gods, but our god-like status is built, ironically enough, on dependence and the weakening of some of our faculties.

Here’s a hypothetical scenario that I think most people can relate to.

“Take a photo of it!” So he takes out his phone and does, then puts the phone away. Nothing after that. A year later, his friend said, do you still have that photo you took of that crazy car we saw when we were out that night. "Oh yeah, sure…sorry I can't find it…oh, no, ok, here it is." He turns to his friend, who is laughing at a meme someone sent him. "Here it is," he says again. "Oh, don't worry about it…hey, did you see this?"

You can take this in multiple ways. It could be that this was a missed opportunity and the absurd places where over-easily accessible technology has taken us, or we could read it as a new form of interaction in which the electronic device is part of an interpersonal transaction.

Maybe, in the museum scenario, the devices were a way of assisting in the communicability of art objects. I am well aware of how technology cognitively rewires us, but there is still a problem.

I can’t help thinking that debased forms of communication have become more normalised. If the prosthetic is the new real, it means that many of us no longer know what to do when confronted with the real thing. Gastronomic analogies can be used again here, like the preference for synthetic flavours over real ones.

Analogue Photography

In the opening days of photography in the 1850s, in the days that history enthusiasts associate with the Gold Rushes in Australia and California, the Diamond Rush in South Africa, and then the Civil War in the USA, all of which are recorded in those steely, high-contrast, grim-looking images, photography was a fairly serious affair. It involved a commitment in the economics of investing in a camera, in the albumin plates on which the images were exposed, in getting the apparatus there and setting up the picture, then developing the negative and transferring it onto paper. It opened up whole new vistas of visual awareness to people who relied on verbal descriptions and good faith. To take the pictures, it attracted misfits and hobbyists and failed artists, many of whom would begin to try to carve out photography as an independent art form.

Photography also put many artists out of business, especially those for whom painting was a local business confined to likenesses, embodied in the personal miniature. It also assisted in scientific practices and in policing, where the photograph was not only a factor of proof but was also treated as an artefact in its own right. Today when we see historical documentaries, we might consider how much attention is given to one photograph, which is, after all, the only image of proof that exists.

Until well into the early decades of the twentieth century, to have a photograph taken meant something, and if it was a portrait, it meant going to considerable trouble. It was very much an event unto itself. The photographic portrait, with all the ceremony of preparation, of taking, developing, and presentation (the frame or vignette of the studio together with the studio's logo and the date), were all treated with consummate care, as such photographs were destined for desks, sideboards, or framed and placed on the wall of the family living room.

They were passed on after death and treated with as much reverence as other heirlooms such as a dress, a cufflink, or a ring. Or perhaps more so, since the photographic image was a safeguard of memory of someone's past and a critical register of one's background, heritage, and identity.

When cameras began to become part of the middle-class household in the economic boom of the 1960s, taking photographs was seen as something of a social right, but it was also a social rite, part of social ritual. A gathering like a dinner with the extended family, a birth or a birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve, and so on had to be punctuated and memorialised with a photograph. To pull out a good camera for such occasions—I still remember how proud my mother was of her Minolta in the 1970s—was a sign of status, but also of one's commitment to seeing that such events were sutured firmly into family history to be brought out on similar occasions.

In the analogue days, you’d load your film, which was to see that not too much was wasted, and you had to have some rudimentary knowledge of the film speeds based on the level of lighting and the shutter speeds you intended to deploy. Analog photographers will still remember that dull tugging feeling on the winding mechanism once the film had reached its completion, maybe feeling a light leap of childish triumph if your photograph tally had exceeded that prescribed by the length of your roll (24 or 36).

For the little more serious extra rolls were kept in the fridge. In the days of colour film, to keep black-and-white film as well as the sign of arty ambitions, that you were wanted to do more than take snaps.

The length of the roll meant you either had to consider each shot, or else have a large store of rolls in your pocket or photographic bag, and be prepared to spend a handsome sum on developing the film. For when the film was exposed, if you were not a professional with your own facility, or serious enthusiast (many of us can still remember the rooms at the back of garages or the taped-up bathroom), then you would set off for the photo-store. Wives would ask their husbands (or vice-versa) to pick up the photos on the way back from this or that as they would pick up the dry cleaning.

After paying for them, maybe scanning the back of the counter and buying more film, few can forget the relish with which the weight of the paper wad felt in the hand, especially if more than one roll had been developed. And the smell of the residue of the chemicals that wafted from them.

Then there was the unveiling. You could do it alone, or save the photographs for all to look at after dinner, as an activity before watching the scheduled prime-time show on one of the six television channels.  

Maybe a few that were faulty were discarded, and the best was then dutifully placed in an album. For the earnest, dates and short descriptions of the event in question were added to the side of the image. Any repeats may have been sent to friends and family interstate or abroad, perhaps together with a recorded cassette with a recording from you and your family members about the state of the world in your corner of it.

This is not all just an exercise on blatant nostalgia. After all, it is easier to tell of loading and developing the film than of doing it, which in retrospect was all fairly cumbersome.

But it had its merits, and most eminent of these is that cumbersomeness of all these efforts meant that a certain value was invested in the process. There was a different sense of disposability. To waste five shots on a 36-shot, let alone 24-shot, the reel was a big deal, not only a waste of money.

It also meant that photographic collections meant something. The limited economy of scale inevitably meant that people would spend more time looking at a single image. Photographs, seen in this way, could also become social intermediaries or catalysts, in the way that they could instigate discussion for a group of people, whether friends sharing reminiscences or parents recounting stories of their past to children.

In this now more historic (and anachronistic) slow-mode, the dynamic of looking and photography was different. You looked, considered, may be considered again, studied the framing of the image within the aperture, then took the shot. Maybe you looked again. That is, if you didn't experience the triumph of having the perceptual reflex of automatic capture of some fleeting moment—there was something athletic in achieving this.

Pictorial Promiscuity: Digital Photography and the Smartphone

With smartphones, looking and photographing has become less smart, so mainstream that the acts of looking and photographing have become scrambled.

Promiscuity, like precocious, is a word commonly used but not wholly understood. A precocious kid is not necessarily a rude one, but one that is advanced beyond its years, although such advancement may lead to the boredom and intolerance that may express itself in rudeness. Similarly, promiscuity is not just having copious amounts of sex, it relates to people who chose sexual partners indiscriminately or with less discrimination, than those who do.

Smartphones make us all promiscuous: now there are just different levels of promiscuity. We live in a mass orgy of photography, and our laptops and hard-drives are the vomitoriums into which we spew them out. Digital dumpsters where the details are never seen again.

When we turn to images we have taken, we seldom go to our hard-drive. We look at the folders there are pleased that the images are there, intact, unobserved, but blissfully entombed. When we look at images on the phone, it is with a scroll mentality. When sharing with another, the "oh yeah" moment has overtaken the eureka moment of the long contemplative sigh.

No surprise that research has been carried out on the cognitive effects of smartphones. One has it that when some students were asked to look at objects and photograph others, their recall of the things they photographed was less than those they did not. 

3.5 billion smartphone users in the world today 

350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day 

95 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every day 

The number is mounting. The coronavirus pandemic caused a rapid rise in digital traffic, given the more interpersonal relations had to become virtual.

Smartphones have made photographs fluid with our own body, so we rely on the apparatus over our memory apparatus. It is said of monuments and memorials that they are there not for us to remember, but to forget: the inanimate object does the remembering for us. The same can be said of how most of us take pictures today: we take pictures to make the apparatus do the remembering for us.

This means that to take photographs today, in the way that we take them, is to entrench our narcissism in manifold ways. We take pictures of events and people as insurance to whatever conscience that we have not been ignorant of and assurance that we have been present. We take photographs of others as a guarantee of our attention, friendship, or love. We have become slaves to cheap commitment.

And we take pictures of ourselves, as an endless emphasis that we still exist, wanting so much to hide how complicit we are the sublimely copious flow of images that, from one moment to the next, threatens to consign us to oblivion.

Why not, then, experiment with a few cases of self-restriction? For example, hold off on your Facebook or Instagram posts, confining yourself to once a week or once a month. Or commit yourself to a project where you only have 40 takes, attempts, exemplars. After that, verboten. Consider the concentration that this causes, and compare that to the ability to take an image without forethought.

Would Facebook or Instagram be able to place daily limits on images we can upload and share?

Imagine the Corona Virus's image-equivalent, where photographs could only be taken and shared under strict conditions, a quarantine of number if you will. Think of how intense domestic isolation made your life, how it served to place many of our mundane activities in sharper focus.

It might be useful to enlist some of the lessons of recent times to the other activities. In this case, we may consider less promiscuous image-taking, opting for a more profound, more lasting, and meaningful relationship.

Have you then gone to an art gallery and looked at an image for longer than five minutes? I recommend it.

Also recommended: if you share a trip or a lunch or dinner with a loved one, take no pictures. Store it all in your head.

Or, if you take your smartphone (or camera for that matter) on a trip, pledge yourself that you will only take a set number of photographs. Say, thirty. Can you do that? 

I practice all of these exercises, and I believe that the discipline and expand the visual mind database. They act similarly to what a "cleaner" would do for your desktop.