Discussion
Why do people take photos? Photographic behaviours serve an astonishing range of purposes and have changed drastically as the practice of image-making has become available to all. At its most basic level, photography is partly about preservation — the drive to halt fleeting moments of joy, beauty or meaning before they disappear into the fallible permanence of human memory is one of the most universal drives human beings have and one that photography satisfies with a kind of immediacy and fidelity that no other medium can deliver. However, photographs do not only call personal memory into play; they also perform social communication functions: in terms of sharing and person-mediated interaction with absent others (social presence), enabling connection across geographic distance (spatial presence), and constructing the visual narratives through which people appear to the world increasingly on digital platforms. For many individuals I believe taking a photograph in and of itself serves an attentional function — acute awareness is created by intentionally noticing and framing a moment that would likely otherwise go unnoticed, resulting in the present-moment quality transcending the image itself.
What do people take photos with these days — cameras or phones? Today smartphones are, without question, the most used photographic device in our society displacing all but certain specialist cameras from every day use with an abruptness and speed that caught the photography industry cold when it first happened. Put simply, the convenient (because you already carry it at all times) but genuinely amazing image quality afforded at a fraction of the cost as genuine standalone devices thanks to rapid computational photography advances have made smartphone cameras better than adequate substitutes; in many respects they are now genuinely superior equipment for most everyday photographic tasks. The dedicated camera remains popular with keen amateurs and professionals alike, especially where optical zoom (for wildlife or sports shooting), very low light performance, and the creative control that an interchangeable lens system brings is required. But the phone camera has comprehensively replaced its dedicated predecessors for the billions of everyday photographs as acts of communication, preservation of memory and social sharing—not artistic or professional production.
Are people going to learn how to take nice photos? The computational intelligence built into all of the modern smartphone camera — automatic exposure, scene recognition, simulated portrait mode shot after shot after night photography algorithm process—brings competent images from nearly any device most of the time without requiring any actual deliberate technical knowledge from the photographer at all. On this measure, it has never been easier to take technically adequate photographs. But the art of actually taking very good photographs — images that are considered in composition, emotionally interesting, communicating something beyond a mere record — is still an acquired skill. Light, a sense of composition, a keen observation that finds the decisive moment and a refinement that encourages him to wait for or create the conditions necessary to achieve exceptional instead of merely satisfactory images are qualities which cannot be completed through algorithms alone; they deliver their fullest rewards only through practice and study.
How do the people store their pictures? Transitioning from physical to digital photography has changed fundamentally how we store and organise our personal photographs. Most photos taken today are digital — living on handsets, stored in cloud services, or archived on computers and external drives. With the advent of cloud-based photo services that can automatically sort photos by date, location, and increasingly also subject using facial- and scene-recognition technology, personal archives of photographs today are both larger and more navigable than the physical albums of our grandparents’ generation. But the accumulation of tens of thousands of digital photographs as a natural consequence of ubiquitous smartphone usage creates its own problems — people are often overwhelmed by how to find specific images, and in that regard, vast online archives can be harder to access than printed, curated albums.
Why Do Indians Click Selfies? The culture of selfies has been embraced with a lot of promise across Indian society, especially amongst the youth in urban areas where smartphone penetration is very deep and social media usage is also commendably high. India ranked constantly and consistently at the top of the selfies per capita chart in the world, and will culturally interact with pre-existing traditions of photography within Indian culture as markers of social occasions, family gatherings, and significant life events. Selfie-taking in India is sometimes caught up with recording travel milestones, dining experiences, and attendance at cultural events–this tendency goes beyond purely social motivations to reflect individualistic elements of impression management but also an inclination to share experiences within larger social spheres. Having said that, views on self–photography is different between generations, economic background and regions of the country — urban youth fad for selfie culture does not transcend India as a whole.
Why do losers enjoy deleting pictures? The decision of deleting the photographs is marked with various motivations which reflect different yet overlapping types. Practical storage management — the pressure to clear up device space as increasing masses of photographs exceeds memory availability — is absolutely probably the most commonplace purpose, although far from thrilling. Far more psychologically intriguing is the selective eradication individuals practice when looking through portraits of themselves — the common adjustment to delete photos that appear unflattering exemplifies the same impression management incentive encouraging conscientious selection for social media distribution, however in reverse. Others take a more deliberate approach to curating their photographs, choosing to purge images associated with broken relationships and unwanted memories or — simply — the versions of themselves they no longer want to be reminded of. As a result, while the ability to easily delete digital images has now made material deletion — in the sense that deleting an image on our phones is as easy as tapping an icon — a natural part of contemporary photographic practice, previous generations of photographic practitioners did not face this same reality; not even close.
Why Some People Might Hold on to Pictures This urge to save photographs is an expression of one of the most elemental forces in human nature — the instinct against loss, decay and separation from a past self, an old friend or a discarded love; all the things time will slowly but surely steal from you. Like memory prosthetics, photographs do not act as replacements for real remembrance but mirrors of sorts that enhance remembrance by evoking better and more specific versions of the personal past — memories in many cases just dimmed into loose impressions that become evoked through pictorial support almost tactilely sensitive to regenerative contextualization. For most, photo collections are like a biography’s worth of text condensed to visuals: the story of a life lived and a history maintained, perennially curated for the future self that owes it to its past. In particular, family photographs have transgenerational significance connecting living familial members to ancestors they may never meet whilst presenting a photographic artifact that requires no replication in its capability to record visual evidence of continuity across generations.
Is Photo-taking/ Photographing People Changed? In fact, deeply and in almost all dimensions. The move away from film to digital photography effectively freed us from the monetary and intentionality barriers that previously paralleled photographic behaviour — when utilising each individual frame generated a real cost and limited pastime, photographers exercised considerably more discretion on what precisely they photographed than today’s virtually free (in many ways) shoots and flashes. The incorporation of cameras into mobile phones changed this dynamic completely, moving photography from something that took up time as a hobby or an occasional practice to an always-on, background layer in the everyday lives of billions of people. With social media sharing, the audience for photography has been made both more immediate and wider, but the purpose of the image is changed for many — no longer something that will be kept in a family archive, it is meant to be consumed online straight away; this changes, irreparably for many photographers their relationship with subject and viewer. Computational photography has moved the realm of creative control from optical and mechanical craft towards digital image processing, driving technical skill lower on the hierarchy and opening up opportunities for creativity through HDR processing, computational bokeh, and interactive in-camera enhancements that film photographers could only dream about.