Vaish Chandrashekar explores our insatiable need to take photographic evidence of our daily lives.

I like to believe that I have a healthy interest in photography. As a law student, I have become increasingly antagonistic towards the written word. For all the love I’ve poured into writing, I’ve grown tired of its deficiencies. How can I hope to capture the world with something as insufficient and open to interpretation as a written description?

Instead, I have been turning more and more towards photography. Yet unfortunately with that has come its own source of problems, and its own loss.

In many ways, the camera is one of the most miraculous technologies we have. To be photographed is to be immortalised long past the initial moment. Prior to smartphones, what was ephemeral remained so, and lived on only in the minds of those who happened to be in the right place at the right time. On their own, memories fray; and what once existed is allowed the dignity of remaining within the exact moment of time it belonged, with those it belonged to. I have begun to feel that, now that everything is archived and witnessed via social media, that can no longer be true.

My foray into photography as an artistic discipline has only highlighted to me how much of my life I photograph already. I capture my food, my friends, the specific way light falls through my bedroom window. I capture the cracks in the pavement through which moss pushes through. I capture my dog playing in the mud. Through this habit, I give a future version of myself the chance to return to that moment and relive that feeling. I once joked with my best friend that my overflowing camera roll is as close to a retirement fund as I will ever accrue. Yet, after this realisation, it dawned on me: I had made a bank of memories, but I had spent a good part of each memory too busy collecting for the future to truly experience their significance.

As a result, I have decided henceforth to refrain from these impulse-driven pictures. Truthfully, I could not tell you why I took them in the first place. As a relief? As proof of experience? The more I examined this impulse to take out my phone and photograph, the more unnerved I became with myself: how little control I had over this nervous habit.

I knew I did not need these photos, but what if I did? What if one day I needed to prove that I had existed in that moment with enough corporal being to have taken that picture? Would it have mattered if I had had these experiences if I had no proof, if no one else could see what I saw. Deleting the photos felt like erasing the experience itself.

I am certainly not alone in this behaviour. As said by Susan Sontag in ‘In Plato’s Cave’, to the general public photography is not an artform, but rather “a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool for power”. It is a way to flatten experience into a commodity to be shared, sold, or spread. While I could not avoid observing this attitude in myself, I saw it even more so from others online, those held within the prying hands of the algorithm. Friends, family, strangers; it seems more so than ever that everyone is vying to be seen. Photographing ourselves, where we have been and what we do, for everyone to see has become endemic to our society.

We are all taking the same pictures. I distinctly remember standing on the Rialto bridge in Venice, thinking about how this bridge has seen a thousand phones take the same photo over and over again. Famously, hoards of people gather in the Louvre everyday to capture their own picture of the Mona Lisa. How many of those people turned around to look at The Wedding Feast of Cana, stationed in the exact same room?

The biggest tragedy at the heart of this cultural phenomenon is the undeniable distance our phone cameras have put between us and the world, which in turn has been eroding our empathy. I have heard numerous stories of strangers, upon seeing someone drunk or passed out on the side of the road, choosing to take a photo and then immediately walking away. A friend once described to me how, during a trip to school, her minivan collided with another car. Thankfully unharmed, the knee-jerk response of these twenty teenagers was to take pictures of the accident: before knowing if the other car was okay, before calling for help, before aiding each other.

This is not a sustainable way to live. Social media companies profit off of our attention, our willingness to digitise our lives, and the quality of our everyday experiences suffers as a result. There is no remedy for this that does not involve removing oneself from our digital monoculture and embracing the anxiety of the fleeting moment. The days that I choose not to obsessively detail my life through photos, to not commit to screen every crevice, a thin layer of discomfort sticks to my skin. This is not an easy feeling to dispel. Nevertheless, sometimes the only way out is through.

Artwork by Ella-Maria Jannetta