A photographer explores the ubiquity of images

Fooling around with a certain bit of relatively recent technology prompted our photographer to ask the question: why are there so many pictures? Our main way of capturing reality, that great manifold of experiences, is still the two-dimensional image. Being a scientist he then sought an answer (where a philosopher might instead have fallen into existential doubt). It’s not so hard to work out, really, but does highlight something important about our memories, and how technology is changing them.

Our photographer writes:

We have five senses. The world has three spatial dimensions, plus color, time and many other aspects. Yet our main means of recording experience is a static two-dimensional representation of what we see. Why?

Mostly for mechanical reasons. We’ve not yet worked out a good way of recording taste, touch or smell, not so as to play it back reliably. In any case, we are strongly visual animals, with hearing an important supplement. (Science fiction writers have explored a bit of what non-visual intelligence might mean; C. J. Cherryh’s Serpent’s Reach of decades ago comes to mind, and no doubt much has been done since.) Recording sound was not possible until the late nineteenth century, after photography was invented in fact, so before then we were just—drawing pictures. And making sculptures; but not only is it much easier to render something in two dimensions, three-dimensional things take up a lot of space. Where you put one small sculpture you can store hundreds of images.

Sound and sight work so very differently that it’s hard to compare them fairly. But it’s a reasonable observation that we keep pictures of our loved ones on our desk, and favorite music (not the voices of spouses or children) on our sound-playing devices.

One wouldn’t have expected digital photography to change that. Recording scenes with electric charges in silicon crystals is different from the chemical mysteries of silver halides, but we still had two-dimensional scenes caught at an instant of time. However, the need to store bigger pictures digitally (so as to compete with, and eventually surpass, film) also allowed one to store more pictures, in fact eventually a video sequence. So now every smart phone can not only take still pictures of quality, but also movies.

Well, people have been making movies for a long time. Even “home movies,” made with equipment available to ordinary people, have been around for well over half a century. But the shift from darkening the room and using a rather awkward movie projector to sharing a video on YouTube is dramatic. It’s every bit as culture-changing as the Eastman Kodak Brownie, which at a stroke allowed almost anyone to be a photographer. Next time you’re on Facebook count the still pictures shared, and then the videos.

So has the still picture finally had its day, to be replaced by the video? I think not, for a couple of reasons. First, the translation from a picture (even a rough sketch) to something real is a process we’re extraordinarily good at—that’s worth another blog post to comment on. Second, the element of time makes a video quite another form of communication. It is not a replacement for the picture, but something else. Movie-makers long ago found this out. It will be interesting to see what the smartphone video develops into.