The camera never lies. Or tells the truth either.

on Mar 18 in Random, Writing tagged by Peter Blackman

Here is my favourite photograph of the moment. It is from a networking event that I did not attend. Kindly, the organisers sent me a link to their facebook gallery anyway.

Isn’t it wonderful?

There he is, looking for all the world as if he is about to be sick all over his shoes.

There she is, red and jolly faced, having a lovely time.

The reality is that he was probably passing by, and that they weren’t actually talking, but isn’t it interesting to imagine that they were? That one of them said something that produced such completely different reactions? In ‘The Decisive Moment’, an essay written by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1952, he said “To photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality.” I’ve always loved the idea of the camera capturing a ‘breath’, a specific physical moment in the lives of the subject. In this case, his was probably a gag reflex to keep all that fizzy lager down, and hers was a snorted guffaw.

The photograph reminds me of the work of Martin Parr, who I saw talk recently at The Story 2011. As the name suggests, it was a day of presentations on storytelling. During his talk, Martin Parr said what he loved about being a photographer was that “You can go anywhere with a camera, you can gatecrash people’s lives”. Parr is famous for his portraits of individuals from all over the world. At The Story he was as candid as his work, saying “photos capture the truth of who we are”, whether that is in a British chip shop or a Brazilian beach.

Is this the basis for why we are all so concerned about our privacy settings on Facebook? That without our knowledge photos like the networking one above will be posted for all to gatecrash our privacy, and to see us as we really are. Even if it is only for a moment. For Cartier-Bresson’s breath. Yet do we need to be so vigilant? So protective of our images? For once that breath is digitised and made into information, rather than flesh and blood, does it cease in many ways to ‘be’ us? Especially when it is being viewed by strangers, like I am to the man and woman in the networking photograph. In a magisterial essay entitled ‘Generation Why?’ on the film The Social Network, the writer Zadie Smith quotes the work of master programmer and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier:

“Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality”. In Lanier’s view, there is no perfect computer analogue for what we call a “person.” In life, we all profess to know this, but when we get online it becomes easy to forget. In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is a degradation, Lanier argues, which is based on [a] philosophical mistake…the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do. We know the consequences of this instinctively; we feel them. We know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We know that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others. We know what we are doing “in” the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us?”

So I have made superficial judgements about the man and woman in the photograph. The way that I have viewed them via a social network has degraded them from individuals to mere cyphers for my, and perhaps now your amusement. Should they be concerned though? I don’t know them - and even though I have seen this photo I still don’t. I too had my photograph taken at a networking event last Thursday. By a glossy, empty free magazine which is seeping into the casual reading occasions vacated by paid for titles driven out of business by the internet. In the photograph I will look bald with bad teeth. This is not how I see myself, even if it is physically accurate. I tried my best to look amused and natural. I will probably look supercilious and smug. It’s what normally happens. So I am concerned by this? Not really. I can’t control the degradation that the media will enact. For it enacts that degradation on the vast majority of the photography that is shared online. For without the talent for capturing psychological insight that Parr, or Cartier-Bresson bring to photography, the images digitised and shared do not show the truth of who I really am. As long as I’m wearing clothes and not breaking any local laws, you can look at any photographs of me that you like. You lucky people.

Wait! Who put that up there? Take it down. Help - I’m being degraded.