The mirror with a memory

There’s an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post today (link is behind a paywall; sorry!). And it’s about something I’ve been thinking about for a while and have wanted to opine on for nearly as long.

The writer comments on some of the features of the latest Google Pixel phone, the ad for which has been ubiquitous during the baseball playoffs this year, and argues that it portends doom and disaster, about how it takes the act of blurring reality to a whole new level.

But does it, really?

Before I get too far into this, I should point out that (1) misinformation online is a problem that’s not going to go away anytime soon, and that (2) FOMO is a real phenomenon that can have deleterious impact on us, psychologically. Especially children. And all of the ways we can edit or alter our photographs are a part of that.

But both of these are problems with social media first and foremost. Modifying a photograph — be it through the artificial intelligence in our phones, photoshop, or cutting them up with a scissors and taping them back together — is a subset of that dishonesty.

I have written before about the Advanced Placement US History course I took in high school. One of the textbooks of that class was a relatively small paperback book whose exact title and authorship escapes me, but it was dedicated to debunking myths and illustrating forgotten aspects of history. I recall essays in this book about how the Founding Fathers were anything but united in just about anything that mattered, about how native Americans weren’t the greatest stewards of the land before Europeans arrived., and how we should not forget the Tulsa race massacre.

There was one article in this text, called The Mirror with a Memory, and I have shamelessly copied that title into this essay. It was about the invention of the daguerreotype and its successor technology, the camera. There is no question that the camera was a disruptive technology: it could capture images more quickly and more realistically than even the best painters could dream. It remains to this day the only technology that forced an art form to truly reimagine itself. When it comes to changes in technology and art, most of the time it’s about the distribution of the art and doesn’t force the art to redefine itself to survive.

Sure, the synthesizer changed the way recorded music is produced but at the end of the day, the synthesizer is just another instrument. And sure, movies have changed the way we view the theatre, but the greater process of writing a script and acting it out are essentially the same whether that’s on a stage or on a screen. We would not have had the art movements in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century were it not for the camera forcing the painters to come to grips with the message of their art.

But just like the paintings commissioned by the wealthy prior to the advent of the photograph, it also could not be trusted to tell the truth. Any time you take a picture of two or more people and tell them to smile for the camera, you’re forcing them to put on a certain expression without regard to how they really feel. And you can never truly tell what’s outside the boundaries of the picture. That happy family staring straight at the camera? Who knows what they’re really feeling or what horrible props aren’t there…

Just ask any nature photographer. In order to get that one awesome shot of a hummingbird sipping on the nectar of a flower, they probably took at least a hundred less awesome pictures before they got that one good one. (And probably another hundred after too…)

That was the overarching thesis of that essay in my high school textbook. The camera was very good and very efficient at capturing not the truth, but the version of the truth that either the photographer or his subjects (or both) wanted to convey. Think of any famous photograph from any point in the history of the camera. Doesn’t the fact that it’s famous say as much about the narrative the picture is trying to convey?

In the more than 150 years since the camera was invented, the tools we have to convey a specific version of the truth have grown more sophisticated, that’s true. And Google’s latest phone builds on those tools, to be sure.

But I think any pushback against opening someone’s eyes or making them smile in a picture, when the intent was for that person to have their eyes open and smiling, is misplacing our anger.