Not long ago, my husband and I spent a few days in Mexico City. Walking down Amsterdam Avenue, I felt the urge to snap a selfie, because that’s what you do, right? We leaned in close as I stretched out my arm and clicked a few frames on my iPhone 6S. I uploaded the best shot to Facebook, where it drew a flurry of thumbs-up and heart emojis. It took about three minutes.
When my mother was my age, she might have recorded that moment with a Polaroid, tucked the photo into her purse, and shared it with friends when she got home. And my grandmother? She’d have used her bulky Rolleiflex, taken the film to the drugstore, and pasted the print into a scrapbook days or weeks later.
What’s interesting here is not the cameras, but the increasing speed and ease with which they create photographs. From the moment the first photograph was taken in 1826 until the iPhone arrived on June 29, 2007, photography took time. By its nature, it recorded history. It said, “I was here.”
The smartphone and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram made photography instantaneous. Suddenly people could take a photo anywhere in the world, edit it with a click and swipe, and send it or share it. The world uploads some 1.8 billion photos each day. Some are brilliant. Most are … not. Yet they all say the same thing: "I am here."
Now your feeds teem with photos of coffee and cats, sunsets and selfies, and other snap-judgment moments destined to die on old hard drives or languish in the cloud. And yet all those seemingly mundane images say more about us than any that came before. In an era when Snapchat and Instagram Stories lets an impulse become a photo, photography does more than communicate. It reflects the id. It says, "I am."
“In the past, people used to feel or think that there is one identity I am born with and take with me throughout my life,” says Daniel Rubinstein, a philosopher at Central St. Martins College. “The identity we now construct is very impermanent and fleeting and pliable. It’s not like I took one selfie and this is me and this is it. In half an hour I will take another, and another, and another … The selfie is not a reflection of me, it is the way by which my own self is coming into being.”
Nicéphore Niépce needed eight hours to make a single fuzzy exposure of his backyard in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, using a camera obscura. By the late 1800s, people in their Sunday best held perfectly still for several minutes as professionals with wood and brass plate cameras made their portrait on glass panes.
Eastman Kodak democratized photography in 1900 with the Brownie, a cheap cardboard and leather film camera that snap-happy tourists toted on road trips and beach vacations. Anyone could take a photo, send the film away to a lab, and get a photo a few days or weeks later.
And so it went for almost 100 years with the advent of 35mm film, the Instamatic and so on. But even as cameras became cheaper and easier to use, they still left you waiting for someone to develop the film and print the images. Polaroid eliminated that with the instant camera, but for most people, cameras remained something to pull out for birthdays, vacations, and weddings. Photography allowed them to share a memory, to say, “I was here.”
“With only 24 or 36 exposures, people were less likely to just photograph anything just so they could show it to someone else,” says Michelle Henning, a cultural historian and photographer at London School of Film, Media and Design.
That changed as film gave way to digital. The first consumer digital cameras hit the market in the mid-1980s, and by the early aughts companies like Sharp and Samsung and Sanyo were putting them in phones. Suddenly you could quickly upload photos to Myspace or Live Journal. A lot of people did.
Then the iPhone happened. The mobile revolution that Steve Jobs started put a camera in every pocket, along with the tools to edit them and, later, platforms like Facebook and Instagram on which to publish them. Anyone with a smartphone could capture a moment and share it in real time. Here I am at the party. Here I am at the concert. Here I am at the beach.
“The ability to communicate your experience to others is something that in the past only the wealthy and the literate had,” Henning says. “Now everybody has this potential.”
Philosophers and photographers pondered these ideas even as the next big shift came with the rise of Snapchat. The platform's co-founder, Evan Spiegel, once called it “a space to be funny, honest or whatever else you might feel like at the moment you take and share a snap.” Snapchat transformed photographs from documents into a language. They convey thoughts and feelings. “I am here” became “I am.”
“We are ourselves a kind of image,” Rubinstein says.
You can call this narcissism. Few would argue as you point to people like Kim Kardashian or the millions of oh-so-carefully curated images filling social media. There's no denying there is a certain amount of artifice to it all. But you also can say these flippant forms of expression create the self.
Mette Sandbye, professor of photography studies University of Copenhagen and has written about photography's ongoing transformation, likens photographs to psychiatry’s mirror stage. That's the point at which toddlers begin viewing themselves as separate from their mothers when they glimpse their reflection in a mirror. “It’s why the self-portrait has become so popular,” she says. “It gives you the chance to see yourself from the outside."
Continually seeing yourself from the outside furthers the evolution of the self, and so “I am” often becomes “As I want to be” or even “As I want you to see me.” But even as everyone strives to be an individual, homogeny sets in.
“Everybody wants to be unique,” says Elizabeth Kilroy, chair of the New Media Narratives program at the International Center of Photography School in New York. “We live in this Kinfolk-Airbnb-WeWork space, where there’s this homogenized modernity. Everything is the same aesthetic. When people are original, they get imitated really quickly.”
She’s right. Thumbing through Instagram or swiping through Snapchat feels less like a chorus of individual voices and more like an echo chamber. “I am” has become “We are.”
“The familiar boundaries of individuality are being erased,” Rubinstein says. “Who can draw the line where you end and I begin? We’re both taking very similar photographs of our dinner along with millions of other people.”
Look beyond all those banal photos of lattes and lunches, though, and this collective wields great power. The torrent of photos filling your feeds each day can introduce you to new things, bridge divides, foster solidarity. And it can give voice to marginalized people---minorities, women, LGBTQ, and so many others who make themselves heard with a smartphone and an internet connection. "One possible future for photography is to be instrumental in creating new forms of community,” Rubinstein says.
I snapped a photo of a donut yesterday. Today I photographed my lunch. Tomorrow, who knows. Whatever it is, it will say one thing: I exist. With each photo, I make that known. We all do.
