Death of the 'photo'

Now, don’t get me wrong I love hipstamatic. I love Casio exilim, Sony ericsson, fuji finepix, nikon, canon and the rest of the digital camera market. What digital did for photography was like what the jet-plane did for travel. I was in absolute awe of my phone when at 5.30am on a clear cold morning in the middle of nowheresville I took a photo, slapped on a comment and posted it to the multinational audience that is facebook. What I did in the 2 minutes it took to take, write, and upload would have taken days if not weeks to achieve 20 years ago. And saying that, there’d be no guarantee that the photo you got back from Truprint even came out, or more likely had your finger covering half the shot.

I love that I can take a photo anytime I like, add effects from a stack of different lenses, films and flash effects, discard all of the bad ones in a second, and show the globe a visual diary of where I am, who I’m with, and what the hell I’m doing.

But…I really miss holding a photo, or a pile of photos. The shiny ones that you hold like someone else’s toast. The ones that your mum shouted at you about when you got your fingerprint on anything but the edge. I miss those days, the days when you looked forward to getting holiday photos back from Boots. Did someone take pictures on my camera? I don’t remember that, why are everybody’s legs cut off at the knee or tops of heads are missing. Those kind of photos.
I saw a t-shirt the other day that said “when I was your age Pluto was a planet” soon we’ll be saying to the youts of tomorrow “when I was your age a photo album was a book” and they’ll stare back in disbelief that we lived in some kind of crazy backward dark age.

Looking back, though, it’s nostalgia more than anything else. Photography just wasn’t convenient. I actually have a film case, undeveloped from the 50’s. I have a Truprint envelope sat next to it but its just not as easy as plug and play now is it? I think the need for a Monty Python style ‘bring out your dead’ service may be in order… or I just need to stop being lazy and post the thing. 

Now where’s that chequebook? Are Postal Orders still a thing?