I was listening to a radio program last week where a correspondent considered if digital technology was really any advantage in our lives. For example, he described how every year he takes thousands of pictures on his digital camera, but how he never does anything with them. I guess you could say I immediately identified with the speaker; I take hundreds of digital photographs every month. On my computer there are over 500 hundred from November alone that I uploaded to iPhoto, edited, and then forgot about. The best I can think to do with any of them is to put them into a Facebook album and choose one very special photograph as my profile picture. I’ve considered having them printed up and placing them in frames but I never seem to have enough time or motivation to actually do it.
Every day I take at least one picture of myself on my computer’s Photobooth application. Sometimes I pretend it’s a mirror and I apply eyeliner or check out how my ass looks. More than once I have been walked in on, standing on the bed and arranging myself in front of the computer to see if I look fat from behind. I justify it by reminding myself that it would be weird to ask someone to photograph how I look when I am sad or happy or especially bored and it would be otherwise impossible to see how I would look with a twin or a severe unibrow.
But I don’t always act alone. I like to arrange “photoshoots” where I assign a theme and pose accordingly. My favorites are a series of pictures with me and my friend Ryan that I call We are in a Band. Taken over the course of a few weeks, the pictures chronicle our rise and fall to musical fame. The first pictures we took are just of our faces next to each other, taking up the whole screen. I am wearing an ironic bright green t-shirt and Ryan is wearing a striped leisure shirt that he could have picked up at any trendy thrift store along our tour route. In the next ones I am sitting in the foreground with an I don’t even care look on my face while he stands behind me with one hand on my shoulder. In the ones that follow my mouth is hanging open with some sort of everyday object resting on my bottom lip like my dorm-key or a Cheez-it. Ryan refused to participate in the last ones, so it’s just me (again) with my arms crossed staring seriously into the camera mimicking my descent into musical obscurity.
Over the summer someone lent me an analog camera. I liked the bulk of the camera and how trendy I looked with it hanging around my neck. After I was shown how to load film, I enjoyed feeding it into the camera. I took roll after roll of film. I was more thoughtful about what I photographed and considered each picture carefully. But then I think of the row of film canisters that still sit on my desk, taunting me to develop them. When I see them I am reminded that the pictures could be blurry or overexposed, and there’s no way to delete them once they’re in your hands, but then, they could be great, there’s a chance that any one of them could my new profile picture.
