The page below comes from the highly recommended Days of War, Nights of Love.
You may also remember the xkcd strip on the same meme.
Anyway, along those lines, one of the other things that really struck me about my most recent trip to the zoo, is that a great majority of people would approach an enclosure with their cellphone, snap a photo, and immediately walk away. Their entire experience of the zoo was the act of taking a low resolution photo — no experience of actually observing the animals or living the environment around them seemed to be desired.
I was thinking that what I was watching was the act of “reverse tagging”. That is, rather than tagging a location (as in scribbling your name on something to show you were there), this was the reverse — using a cellphone camera, the location scribbled its signature onto the viewer’s Facebook page to show it had been visited by them. The photos were cheap, blurry, and too small to actually go back and even appreciate the image of the animals, and had no value other than to show the person had been there… although in the absence of the individual in the photo, one could argue it didn’t really even do that.
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Susan Sontag’s essay “On Photography” talks extensively on this subject… if you haven’t read it already I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
I’ve seen a variant of this in art museums. Done it myself, too.
By my calculations, 50% of what’s in art museums belongs in dumpsters. 30% is ok. 10% I could do myself. I walk by all that stuff.
9.95% is good. I stop and look at that stuff briefly.
0.05% is inspiring. That’s the stuff you stop and look at for a long time. The stuff you come back to. The stuff that, if you don’t realize it’s there, will never draw you into a museum. That’s the part that a lot of people don’t realize exists.
Everyone’s stats are the same. Everyone thinks half the stuff is garbage. Everyone thinks 0.05% is inspiring. The catch is, everyone puts the works in different piles.
I think zoos are like that, in a way. A sleeping deer just isn’t that inspiring, at least not to me. River otters, on the other hand…
God, I hate facebook and myspace. Its like you cant be alive unless every one of our peers sees you inner most workings and recognizes your existence. We used to value privacy? But now we throw it away on purpose.
We are so conditioned.
WLF has not been to Modern Tate!
I agree. I think too many people these days live through the eye of a camera. I really dislike it.
I hardly ever photograph anything and in the circumstance you’re refering, Id end up missing whatever it was I was trying to get a good shot of. I think people are now relying far too much on artificial type memory. Don’t use it, lose it.
Besides, memories have much more to do with perseption, not caption.
Great find Shannon, this inspires me, I hope others take something from this too.
Cellphone cameras should be banned, everyone thinks they’re a photographer, but the vision just isn’t there……….
i have everything that crimethinc ever released (surprised, right). ok, i downloaded it ‘cos the shipping of the original material is to expensive.
on the flip side, however, I for one can not get enough of the zoo or museums. I have to be pulled away. I enjoy such tasks as those in my life that I am reduced to that of a carefree child… much to the amusement and encouragement of my friends and family.
My favorite chapter in that book is on Love. Along those lines I think I’ll prefer to hold onto my deodorant.
A big part of the reason why people need partners. To have a witness to their life. Also the reason people blog. And for a good blog, you’ve got to do something interesting.
Art is just opinions. Just ask Marcel Duchamp.
Maybe they’re taking pictures of the animals before we kill them all forever.
I would look at this in a different way. Yes people are recording tons more these days…but think of all the stuff that isn’t interesting enough to be recorded by the masses. If you’re in that group, it’s time to worry.
And Shannon, your daughter paints like a 4 year old. Terrible.
And so do you come to think of it.
How about we save the animals instead of taking pictures of them because we are under the misconception that we cannot save them.
If your comment was blatant sarcasm meant to show how ridiculous it is to take pictures of something because you know it will die soon… i’m sorry.
I do take more than my share of pictures, and I know that 99.99% of them look like crap. But I also don’t plan on showing them to anybody. They’re just a journal for myself. I have a terrible memory, and I’m always wondering what I did a week/month/year ago. The pictures are just there to replace the part of my brain that seems to be malfunctioning.
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[...] about something else that I’d read more recently over at one of my other daily reads, Zentastic. What I’m talking about here is called reverse tagging and here is a bit from [...]
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