- “All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”
— Richard Avedon
Why do people feel the need to “capture” everything they see? Have our memories become so short that we need a digital reference for our entire life? or have we become so untrusting that photographic evidence is more important than a good story? Not to say that great photographs don’t tell stories, but 99% of today’s digital photographs are taken simply to “capture” their subjects. The ten pictures of your cat that you just took will not spark great emotion in your viewers. Twenty pictures of your child’s soccer game don’t show how talented they are. And yet, in your effort to capture how proud you claim to be of your child, you have forgotten to truly pay attention to them when they deserve it. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen people miss important moments in their lives because they were trying to take a picture of it. With the ubiquity of camera phones, suddenly everyone feels empowered to take pictures, but they do it without respect for the moment they are living in. This is where the quote above comes into play, every photograph is an accurate representation of how a thing looks, but no picture can describe every intricacy of a moment the way the human brain can experience it.