I sometimes think that photography’s current tremendous popularity is a collective reaction to the fear of living in a world on the brink of destruction. It’s our desperate attempt at recording as much of it as we can before it all disappears. What’s not clear to me, however, is how this human comportement is going to lessen the loss. Is it to build a massive scrapbook to browse through on particularly cloudy post-apocalyptic days and remind ourselves of how happy we once were? Or are we motivated by the dream of being eventually able, through some prowess of network prestidigitation, to recombine our vast library of past images and recreate our world as it was before the great cataclysm?
I can’t fathom any other reasons that would explain people’s spontaneous snapping of all and sundry views of their surroundings as they roam the world, frantically amassing pixels that, for the most part, are never subsequently reviewed.
