The age of pictures is upon us. We have traveled through the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age to reach the Digital Age. The new technology of each age affected our societies in different ways. In the digital age, we are drowning in imagery. People call it the information age, but it is quite clear at least half of our population is not absorbing much data. We deny reality while posting happy pictures of our birthday parties and those delightful shots of pets lying in contorted positions around the house. We are in a mad rush to share our banal lives at every opportunity. We hope that a new hat, a severed finger, or trophy moment, will validate that we are indeed living a life.
My mother was a professional photographer. She spent the greater part of her life looking at the world through a camera lens. We would sit in the dark with her from an early age as she went through culling her images. She spent a lot of time walking and observing her surroundings before deciding to lift the camera to her eye. I take pictures now and again and try to spend a lot of time choosing, cropping, and especially, culling.
We are all photographers now, or perhaps not. We are all recorders. Meals we eat, wines we drink, views from our hotel balconies, the smiling kids, those impressive vegetables in our gardens. We take the shots, but then we must quickly make room for more by disposing of them on Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, or other media streams. They are not for keeping or savoring. We cast them into the raging torrent of images cascading through our lives. We are rocks in a digital river as the never-ending flow of pictures splashes around and over us. It wasn’t that long ago that people might only own a wedding photograph of themselves or a couple of hard staring family portraits, and that was it.
The recent Napa Valley fires brought these thoughts to the forefront of my mind. So many images appeared of things around us burning. My Facebook feed was fiery Hades in hourly increments. Buildings ablaze, homes lost, and dreams incinerated. But looking is not reality. Pictures are not a thousand words. They are our eye candy in a digital age of instant imagery, capturing everything and nothing in a gasp of titillation.
I got through the evacuation lines with a dubious slip of paper. I stood utterly alone in the center of a burnt-out Napa Valley winery. Blood red coagulated wine dripped slowly from a matt charcoal glazed stainless steel tank. It made a good picture. At that moment, however, I thought about how muffled my footsteps were in the heavy ash of the floor. It felt like moving through warm dirty white snow. I heard the sad, soft crunch of glass underfoot and the grating sound of metal being pushed against metal as I moved around. The harsh, acrid smoke hung in the air, mixed with the sweet vinegary smell of a dumpster nearby filled with pomace. The heat of the fire still emanated from the stone walls. I plunged my hand into the ash burial mounds to pull out some corkscrew inventory that had burnt. Underneath the surface, it was like a warm billowing pillow. The skeletal corkscrews were hot steel in my hands. I threw them in a pile like dead soldiers in a trench. Cut down before their time, olive wood cremated and gone; they would never see the cork of a bottle.
Yes, I took pictures, but no image I chose to put my butterfly pin through could ever begin to hint at the unique loneliness of that moment. The layering of senses and emotions of how all things come to an end. The majesty and terror of the cycle of life. I could have been the only person in the world in that quiet morgue. All these pictures we take can memorialize, record, amuse, shock, and prod us in various ways. A rare few can become emblems of an event, or time, our Iwo Jima moments. But they are wholly inadequate communicators of life. We should take and post fewer pictures and videos of our lives. They interrupt and erode our capacity to be fully present in times that require our full attention if we are to live a full life.