Over Exposed: Our Lives in 100,000 Photos

Some say that when any person born after the year 2000 is about to die, a Google Photo slideshow reel flashes before their eyes. From birthdays to vacations to fancy home-cooked meals, a thousand images parade through one’s mind in an instant as a generic, cheery tune whistles in the background. Our lives have become so centered around images that it’s difficult to distinguish one’s life and one’s life in pictures.

Norm Macdonald once quipped that he had only one picture of his great-grandfather. Back then, according to Norm, “when it took six hours to take your picture,” every man only had one picture of themselves.” That was the extent of how someone was to be remembered. Despite a lifetime of various moods, seasons and relationships, a typical person would be commemorated by one snapshot. For this reason, a photograph of a great-grandparent is likely a cherished heirloom. I have one particular image of a great-grandparent forever etched into my mind for this very reason.

On the contrary, today we are literally inundated with over-exposure. Rarely a day goes by that isn’t documented. Norm pokes fun of how saturated our lives are with personal documentation, saying, “Fifty years from now, people will say, ‘Hey, do you want to see 100,000 photos of my great-grandfather?’” It’s a funny thought, but it also begs the question: who are we taking all of these photographs for?

As my own family’s self-appointed family photographer, I find myself behind the lens of my phone all too often. If my children are behaving well and the lighting is good, it is nearly impossible to not try to capture the moment on my phone. The word “capture” feels eerily apropos as does the other aggressive terms of photography — being “caught on camera” or taking a “snapshot.” A moment when my family looks attractive is not something to enjoy for its own sake; rather, it must be commandeered, pulled out of time and be stored somewhere for all eternity (as long as I choose not to delete it).

Why do we have the urge to obsessively document our children’s daily lives? Why does every dinner date or homemade cake have to be recorded in the annals of history? Photography promises to transform a moment into something higher than a mere occurrence. As Hans-Georg Gadamer said, “It is by being pictured that a landscape becomes picturesque.” In other words, a photo enlarges the significance of what is photographed. It has the power to transform people into legends, food into masterpieces, and a fleeting moment into timeless history.

The essence of our camera-ready society is that we are hoping that we will be judged not on who we are but on how we are presented. A picture may say a thousand words, but it still only tells a small fraction of our life. Far more happens off-camera than we would care to admit. What happens when the light doesn’t hit us just right or when we are caught on camera doing something heinous? Unlike unwanted photos, we can’t simply delete the unflattering areas of our real lives.

If we’re behind the camera, however, we are viewing life from the director’s chair rather than our proper place in the world as a play-actor. The image of a stadium full of fans comes to mind, each of them taking the same concert video, while nearby professional camera crews provide them with much higher-quality content. We do this because we would much rather tell our own narratives rather than someone else tell them for us. Being behind the camera is one way of convincing ourselves we control the narrative.

Being convinced of something doesn’t make it true, of course. There’s plenty of reason to believe that we’re surrendering any control we had to the cameras themselves.

Writing in 2018, Brian Resnick contended that: “We are literally outsourcing our mental capabilities to computers,” citing a famous 2011 study that found when people are told a computer will save a piece of information, they are less likely to remember it for themselves. Resnick presents this dilemma as a series of trade-offs. Sharing photos with others allows us to relive those experiences, but also limits our own understanding of those experiences. Thanks to our phones, we will be able to remember what we were wearing at the family reunion, but will we have been too distracted by our phones to recall the cool breeze or the smell of Uncle Herb’s barbecue? We often think pictures will preserve an emotional quality to them, but a photo will often fail to capture the scope of an experience.

Having a compulsion to live behind the camera runs the risk of becoming the man in Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Vacation,” who documents every moment of a water-skiing excursion. No doubt, the camera will faithfully preserve his vacation so that “after he had had it he would still have it. It would be there. With a flick of a switch, there it would be.” Berry’s final line, however, is devastating: “But he would not be in it. He would never be in it.” It’s a convicting thought, that wanting to preserve a moment may come at the cost of experiencing that moment. Just like any letter of the law, the very thing that was designed to bring life brings death; what meant to bring freedom, brings bondage.

Whether we water ski with an iPhone in hand or opt instead to take in the scenery as a fleeting moment that will soon be forgotten, it is good to be reminded that far more is going on beyond the scope of our lens. Thankfully, Jesus frees us from the compulsion to remember every moment of our lives. “Just remember one thing,” he says every week, “Me.” And, don’t worry, you won’t need a photograph to jog your memory. His life goes on apart from Google Photos or even a cloud for that matter. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the Word is worth much more.