World without cameras, world less aware

Daily selection by editors at Flickr.com/explore for February 19, 2024

Seeing so many pictures gathered from all levels of photographic skill, location, and subject matter is astonishing in the daily set of picks online at Flickr “Explore.” This screenshot is only the top of a long series of screens to scroll and gives a sampling of what attracts the eyes of people carrying cameras who point and shoot impromptu when a scene presents itself, as well as those purposefully searching for (or creating) a composition. No matter the motivation and circumstances around the making of a given photo that the person chooses to upload for public viewing, what is universally true is that none of the seeing, recording, and communicating would be possible without first having a device to focus and capture light; i.e. camera lens and recording medium.

In order to appreciate the consequences of ubiquitous cameras (and online sharing platforms), perhaps the best way to visualize the effect is to suppose there are no cameras. While early forms of photography began in the middle 1800s (sitting for a tintype recording), it was only with the Kodak Brownie box camera that non-experts could begin to record significant things in their world of people, places, and events. Even in the 1890s, though, the number of households with a Brownie was miniscule. Large numbers of people only began taking pictures in the post-WWII generations as the Baby Boom presented an obvious subject to record at home – the growing up and family events of all those newborns. Cameras got better, cheaper, and more commonly carried. Enthusiasts multiplied. Professionals specialized in many kinds of subject and publication outlets. And then with cellphone cameras reaching similar quality to the cheap film cameras (and then exceeding them), since around 2005 or 2010 the proliferation of cellphones has made pictures of anything and everything possible; at first a novelty, then an expectation to see people snapping stills and video of things momentous or banal. And while having ready access to a camera – most often as part of a cellphone – does not mean the person considers herself or himself an adept visual observer and artist, by force of habit, people are ever more accustomed to taking photos in their own way and seeing their surroundings as “photo opportunities” – not as an afterthought, but in some cases as the main point; what makes the experience real, enjoyable, meaningful, and possible to show others, too.

What happens when more and more people are taking pictures for personal records or to document a subject or to give to others? Without having cameras that enabled cheap, easy, and convenient recording and circulating far and near, the only visual medium to represent 3-dimensional subjects in 2-dimensional form was visual art with brush, pen or pencil, for example. It could be a quick sketch or a detailed representation to scale. But most people lack such hand-eye coordination –the training and experience to see, and to record the lines and textures and colors and play of shadow and light. Instead, the average person would resort to word-images, “painting pictures with words” if they were verbally gifted. Others might buy a tourist postcard or print produced by the eye and hand of an artist to share with friends and family, or to cherish as personal reminder of a time and place.

Now with so many picture-takers, the likeness of a subject can be recorded with a tap or press of a button. Not everyone cares or finds rewarding the careful composition and reflecting on the art of making a picture. Instead it is enough to capture some vestige of a fleeting moment and then rely on storytelling skills to complete the meaning. And yet as more and more people do take pictures routinely and some of them begin to refine their efforts to get better results, such as the gems that Flickr editors showcase each day at flickr.com/explore, then one’s thinking that is paired with one’s seeing and one’s noticing the details of a place and moment also changes. In other words, the habit of going through one’s day and life with a camera in hand or at the back of one’s mind means that things like foreground, juxtaposition, shadow detail (penumbral light), mixed lighting temperatures, and so on begin to stand out more and more. Pre-camera, maybe the things in the thumbnail images, above, might merit a remark or pause to admire before pressing on in one’s day. But now when one’s attention is drawn, it seems natural to frame a composition by choosing a standpoint, and angle of view, and a chosen moment to release the shutter.

A world without cameras is still visually rich, but the integral relationship between seeing and thinking is less readily sharpened without the aid of a camera to produce detailed images for scrutiny, sharing, and reflection that leads to a virtuous cycle for improving one’s seeing and recording. In short, filling the world with cameras makes it easier to pay attention to the visual (and social) environment. One’s sensibilities for light, composition, timing, and so on are amplified so that even on days with no camera at hand, one’s visual experience of a place and time is much richer, filled as it is with possible images to compose. As one’s seeing is heightened, so, too, is one’s thinking developed.

Margin notes, tangents of thought, flights of fancy

Never open a book without a pencil in hand [Ben Franklin paraphrase]

Depending on the source – words, images, music and other sounds – the ways we routinely engage with the material will differ. Static sources like book or photo allow self-paced interaction, annotation (margin notes directly on the page; memo prompted by photo – or online commenting), and the ability to return again and again to revisit the idea or subject as expressed. By contrast moving source materials (e.g. movie and TV) rarely stop to let the viewer mark a passage or add their own questions and insights that connect to the passage. Somewhere between the reader/viewer control of the static sources and the viewer lack of playback control of the moving sources is a third sort of material: music and TV and talk radio (while at work or home; or driving) can work both ways —with scrutiny or with inattention. The person can pay attention closely and focus on the ideas or impressions caused (immersive), or the person can disregard the source to some extent by treating it as background material not requiring attention (filler).

Attending to the road, listening to radio talk show or music, thoughts bubbling up.

To a thinking person the reason why these different forms of relating to verbal, visual, static versus moving content matter is because of the limiting terms of engaging the material: some of these sources can produce new thoughts and understanding better than others. Each of these things occupies certain times and places in one’ s life, but not all of them generate increases to one’s overall understanding of self and surroundings. The key point of distinction is the opportunity for the person to interrupt the flow of thoughts and new information in order to digest, compare, hypothesize, connect with prior knowledge or personal illustrations of what is conveyed by the material. With a book or photo album, it is possible to pause, go on a tangent, return and resume. But with live theater or lecture, a movie, or the (recorded) performance of music, the material just keeps coming and to stop the playback or momentarily absent oneself from the live flow of an event long enough to jot a note can detract from the fluid, uninterrupted experience.

So when it comes to the things that generate thoughts and understanding best, it is not the emotional thrill or the intellectual revelation produced in the flow of moving/performing arts, but instead the carefully composed and captured words on a page or in the image on display that let the mind wander and wonder best, again and again. Eventhough performed, non-static content is best able to pull along the viewer or listener, producing the strongest sensory experience of vicarious participation, this stimulation is not the same sort of constructing, contrasting, or connecting that happens with the written word or the composed picture.

Gathering photos and commentary into ebook, a pattern emerges

One thing after another seems to distract me from completing the process of gathering my selected online photos, together with their commentary, into an ebook. Now at last, two years from returning from a year’s work in rural Japan, the process is nearing completion under a working title of “Life and Times Today in Rural Japan.”

Screenshot of ebook process to group and sequence the image+commentary selections

The genesis for the online source images and their commentaries is a Flickr account where I aggregated the Japan photowalks into albums according to season, for the most part. Certain events or subjects made sense to aggregate on their own, though. Browsing others’ photo essay ebooks online, I began to think about repurposing the individual Flickr uploads with their tags, date stamp, camera exposure data, and the paragraphs or sentences of remarks that I added at the time. Collecting the images that had more than a brief comment and then somehow importing them into a wordprocessor to prepare for book presentation was an idea that intrigued me.

Sadly, there is no One-Touch method to export from Flickr and import into a wordprocessor. As a result the transition from chronological photo-stream into a series of grouped topics required a lot of hands-on cutting and pasting. But the act of massaging the entries and scrutinizing the text led me to discover points of weak writing or incomplete discussion to fix. And also I began to see the pattern of observation that runs through a lot of the cumulative visual record between fall 2016 and fall 2017.

Given my training in cultural anthropology, my interest in social change in Japan, and in visually documenting the many subjects that are changing over time, it is not surprising to find the sorts of scenes that caused me to stop and compose a photo or video clip before returning home to upload and write a few lines of reflection that stem from the scene. There are two layers that seem to be the most frequent in these scores and scores of pictures with their commentaries. One is connecting the subject with the wider context of the society and culture or language of Japan overall, or within the specific regional setting for the images. This fits the working method for anthropology: a concern with capturing the context of a place, its people and their language, both at the moment of description but also in the flow of time – what came before this moment of recording and what may well follow into the foreseeable future. Many of the commentaries and their photos put the scene into the wider river of time or in regard to some significant cultural reference point.

The second pattern for the collected photos with commentary is to notice small details. For local residents, perhaps, the color or shape or symbol for an object, or the arrangement of a place may seem unremarkable; it is normal, familiar, and to be expected. Only something that differs from that norm might attract attention or comment. Through foreign eyes the same subjects might look very different. For these visitors just passing through, perhaps, a peculiar shape or unfamiliar habit might go unnoticed because it does not trigger feelings of recognition or memories of similar situations. The outsider’s eye passes over the thing by regarding it as not carrying significance; it is culturally and linguistically invisible. In between these extremes, the native insider and the foreign outsider, there is a middle position: a foreign observer who does speak the language and does know the cultural meanings of that society; an ethnographer with a camera and bicycle like me, for example. Neither being in the familiar position of the local resident, nor being in the unfamiliar position of the stranger, I have been able to remark on scenes and have articulated something of their cultural or contemporary significance. Even though my line of reasoning is not native, it is closer to native than is the perspective of the total foreigner. Thus I am able to describe some of the common-sense local meaning of insiders, and maybe even point out some of the taken-for-granted meaning that scarcely rises in the minds of the local residents who are accustomed to the product, service, or practice. In other words, being positioned in-between native and outsider allows one to notice things that others, perhaps, do not find significant. After all, seeing the world in a grain of sand is not something that everyone is accustomed to, capable of, or interested in. Although, in the end, it could also be true that the grain of sand really is just a grain of sand; not the whole world.

Taken together, connecting the scene with its wider context AND noticing small details that offer a foundation to build a larger commentary, these two patterns occur again and again among those subjects that first invited my camera and from which I selected the ones having relatively longer discussion. This recurring tendency to notice small things, but also to consider them in larger contexts of time and place and culture and language contribute to an anthropological point of view; not the scholarly kind with great long sentences and social science standards to document one’s theory being tried, the methods being used, and the sources being scrutinized with those methods. Instead of formal reasoning and expository writing, the small space of Flickr pages for commentary has produced brief sketches for each scene – what is going on, understanding it within the larger meanings of Japanese life and the historical time, but also giving attention to small details that can mean larger things. Noticing details and connecting larger contexts of meaning are the two patterns that characterize this forthcoming ebook of “Life and Times Today in Rural Japan.”