it might take me months to delete every screenshot i've ever taken
decentering the phone camera
a photo of mehendi i did on my hand, taken on my sony cybershot.
the year i was born, my parents bought a sony cybershot point and shoot camera and handycam camcorder. these were utilized to record clips of baby me toddling around, mumbling, harassing my younger sister, singing in primary school concerts, dancing to bollywood music videos playing on the box tv, standing awkwardly in front of various landmarks during vacations. video taken on this camcorder is the only proof that exists of me ever speaking my parents' native languages of tulu and konkani, both of which i didn't retain after learning english in preschool.
these photos and clips were utilized in a variety of ways. we had physical photo albums filled with both older yellowing, faded images of my parents from the first years of their marriage before i was born, with various aunts and uncles and cousins that were taken with slightly shittier cameras, as well as newer shots that featured me and my sister as babies in high saturation. we also had a digital photo frame on the ledge that separated the kitchen and living room that cycled between whatever photos were contained within the usb stick plugged into it.
their most time-consuming utilization of the point & shoot and camcorder involved a now-obsolete software: microsoft moviemaker. my mother would compile these camcorder files into long form video collages and slideshows complete with powerpoint-esque transitions in between each video clip framing comic sans text proclaiming what year or event the following clips were from before fading out or zigzagging into the media. the end results were lengthy videos that they'd occasionally play on the tv as a fun family time activity to show us what we were like as kids, or simply to provide visual evidence of me manhandling my sister when she was a baby. the making of these slideshows, films really, was no small or easy task. in addition to spending weeks putting each one together, it was also a highly involved process that required using specific cables to connect the camcorder to a large and heavy laptop (an hp pavilion i think??), name and save the files, upload them to moviemaker in the right order, decide where to add transitions, how many date ranges or events to group together and then one by one add the transitions, text, etc.
barely twenty years ago, the act of capturing, preserving, and displaying photo and video was a multi-step process that could take weeks. now i can pull my phone out of my bag, open the camera, snap a photo, and share it to instagram directly from the photos app all in under five minutes. if i want a video collage of my year, i can just get the photos app to automatically mash together every video i''ve ever taken and add some shitty background music with the press of one button.
it's just so much easier, so much more convenient to take photos on my phone, it's just so easy to rack up hundreds and thousands of selfie duplicates, screenshots, overly filtered instagram story posts, more screenshots, etc etc etc over the course of one's smartphone usage lifetime.
this is why i decided why one of the projects i would assign myself to stave off boredom during my two week top surgery recovery period was to go through my cloud gallery containing every photo i've ever taken since 2019 and delete all my screenshots.
actually, delete screenshots and selfies.
actually, delete most photos of myself, because when do i ever go back and look at all my fit checks??
actually when do i go back and look at any of these photos?
i realized i never do. i take mundane meaningless photos constantly, of memes, of my face, of my clothes, of my window, my roommate's cat, my ceiling, my forehead, the stupid spelling mistakes people make at my job, my material possessions, and i never do anything with the photos other than post them once. i never go back and look at them, i've never put any of them in an album or tacked them up on my wall, and when i really thought about it, i realized very few of my photos were actually worth putting in an album, or keeping in general. why did i have so much photo clutter?
a sampler of some of the screenshots sitting in my gallery
going through my cloud storage and looking back at all my photos was very uncomfortable for me. i was confronted with an endless scroll of screenshots of texts from people that weren't in my life anymore, a quite embarrassing number of selfies from years ago, more screenshots of instagram memes, and so many photos that i not only didn't want sitting around in my gallery, but were also just uncomfortable or irritating or sad to look at. somewhere in the ease and convenience of taking photos, and in the centering of posting about every little thing, i lost the intentionality of taking photos. twenty years ago, my parents pulled out the camcorder to take a video of themselves speaking to small child me in kannada to ask if i liked the dupatta i was wearing to go to the temple, a pretty mundane topic, but they then put in the time and effort of editing this video into a longer collage organized by date of little clips of me at that age. whatever they took photos and videos of was actually meaningful, and there was an intent to do something more long lasting with the media, whether that be a video collage, or a physical photo album.
when i turned 18, i dug out the sony cybershot, the handycam, and all our other old or obsolete electronics to determine which ones i could take with me when i moved out, and which ones to give to e-waste. i couldn't log into the ipod touch, i had no use for an ipad, and the handycam was unrevivable, but i was pleasantly surprised to find that the sony cybershot, after lying dormant for my entire adolescence, charged up and functioned just as it did ten years ago and had a photo quality that far surpassed any smartphone camera i'd ever used. it's been in my possession ever since. recently, i got myself another digital camera, the olympus stylus tough. eventually i hope to have this digital camera replace my reliance on the phone camera, and so far it's been a great alternative. my sony cybershot still works perfectly, but it can never replace my phone camera because i'm too scared of it getting damaged to keep it in my bag and take it everywhere. the stylus tough on the other hand, is waterproof, shockproof, and has a screen that flips out 180 degrees so one can take a "front camera" photo. it has a wide angle lens, similarly to the iphone, but the quality is so much better. it doesn't do any of the automatic image processing that makes iphone photos turn out flat and grainy and lacking in color vibrancy. having to pull out a separate device specifically meant only for taking photos really forces me to be intentional about what i take photos of. i'm not going to fish around in my bag to take a photo of someone's misspelling of shimmer as shimer to send to my friends for a quick laugh . in the one month i've owned the olympus, i've used it mostly to take weekly photos of my post-op chest so i have healing progress photos to refer back to.
to give myself something to do with my photos, i got a photo album and a mini inkjet photo printer from ebay. my intent with all this has been to slow down my instinct to snap everything and instead utilize the minute it takes me to take my camera out of the case and switch it on to decide if i really want to capture whatever it is, if this is something i might actually want to look back on, if this is a photo i would print and display in an album. if not, i let it go. or i try to. i no longer use instagram that much, so i rarely end up taking the kinds of photos that i would take just to post once and forget about. i no longer take photos of my earring stacks or my outfits because those photos were never for me to look at, they were always for others in my phone to see and comment on for 24 hours. in the past month, i've noticed i've only taken a photo of myself when i got my hair cut so i could have an updated profile image.
getting a digital camera has kind of been to photos what an ipod has been for my music library. i've rediscovered the joy of capturing a photo, of making everyone hold a pose for a minute longer than they're used to, of how well the colors pop, of the sound of a shutter, of getting to choose what settings to apply for each moment. taking a photo now feels like an act, rather than a task, and i get excited to take a few minutes to pull out my camera, adjust the dials, take some time to frame, and snap.
a child's croc abandoned by a stream, and my father looking at a waterfall, taken on the cybershot.
