Cameras

Just minutes after my son Eli was born he became familiar with two things being pointed at his face. The second thing was the lens of a camera. Cell phones, point and shoots, video cameras, and professional SLRs have been a near constant presence in his daily life. I'm starting to wonder what affect this has on him.

My dad recently remarked that kids nowadays are more photogenic (although perhaps less genuine) because they’ve been asked to “say cheese” since they were babies. A quick glance at a family picture from the 1960s is all it takes to give credence to this theory (was the sun perfectly positioned behind every photographer to make those squinty-eyed, grimacing faces necessary?) But is it a good thing that children grow up opposite a camera lens these days?

I certainly see some problems that can arise from that kind of attention. Case in point: Lindsay Lohan (or any of the child celebrity types gone bad). Apparently if you’re in focus that often it’s easier to live life in a blur. There’s also the superficial nature of the posed photograph to consider. The way people curate their lives online by posting only flattering, set-up, or edited pictures reinforces the importance of appearances. And it downplays the real lives of the people in them. But cameras aren’t always used this way.

One day Eli was rolling around on the ground with his 91-year-old Nana (yes, Nana was on the ground with him. She’s quite spry). My wife whipped out her cell phone to capture the moment. Nana commented that it’s nice that everyone has a camera to capture these moments because it wasn't like that when she was growing up. Indeed it wasn’t. Actually, I think times were a little tough for some people in the 1930s and Kodak moments might not have been a priority. Plus, you couldn’t post pictures to Facebook so where was the fun in taking a picture of an epic bread line?

So maybe cameras aren’t all bad. Perhaps there are more people who wish they'd had a camera so that they could've captured some of life's fleeting moments for later. Like a lot of technology, the issue frequently comes from how it's used instead of some inherent quality. That's an easy thing to confuse. But Nana's remark helps clear things up: cameras aren’t for creating moments, they’re for capturing them. And some moments are worth hanging on to.