Conforming to the machine

Our photographer notices how a new technology forces our bodies into new positions.

Our photographer writes:

A few years ago I was attending an event and noticed many people adopting a strange posture: standing, hands out in front at eye level, holding a device about a foot in front of their faces.  I couldn’t recall seeing people in that position before, but here it was common.  They were using digital cameras, of course, and were composing their pictures on the screen at the back of the device.

New inventions have always given rise to strange-looking situations.  A newspaper writer in Glasgow at the beginning of the last century recalled his first sight of a telephone: “a man, apparently with all his wits about him, conversing with a tea-caddy.”  Photography has produced its share.

The first cameras required the photographer to compose the picture on a ground-glass screen at the back.  If the session was taking place outside or in bright light, to see the image the photographer would have to pull a dark cloth over it and his or her head; imagine the sight of someone apparently retreating into his coat on a bright sunny day!  When the Brownie came along, with a viewfinder that used a mirror, one compsed a picture of the scene out in front by looking straight down.  It must have been strange for someone to be apparently engrossed in an object held just in front of their stomach, and actually taking a picture of a scene they were apparently ignoring.  (A “waist-level finder” is still a useful device to take pictures of people without their noticing.)

With 35mm cameras, rangefinders and later SLRs, instead of looking at some ground-glass image the photographer looked directly through a set of optics.  This wouldn’t have been terribly strange; it was the way people had used telescopes and binoculars for many years; but was a new way of operating for photographers.

With the coming of digital cameras, as I mentioned, the screen at the back became the method of choice for composing the picture.  Although they still had optical viewfinders people found the screen to be a better representation of the final picture, and thus adopted the strange posture that initially struck me.  I’ve also noticed that people with digital SLRs hung around their necks put them into a sort of sloping-down position to review recent captures, neither up at the ready position nor hanging directly down.  In the days of film one might have seen something like this briefly as the photographer checked something on the back of the camera, but not often.

Smartphones and tablets impose another set of postures again, people apparently waving books or packs of cards in the general direction of the scene.  And of course there’s the ubiquitous selfie pose.

These days we hear much about machine learning, with computers adapting to various situations.  I think it’s interesting how quickly and completely humans adapt to a new device, putting themselves into postures they’d never consider before.  We are good at conforming to the requirements of our inventions.