chat

i'm also an old, though i'm the "young one" out of my most immediate family, not including my sibling's kid who is like 12. when we all go to things, me and the kid are the one who actually look around at shit. the others, the boomers and the gen x, all have their phones out and are trying to frame the world around them onto their little handheld screens to take pictures and videos literally zero people will ever give a shit about, though maybe 8 people will click "like" on it when it goes by their feed, because it's not an advertisement, a toxic-positivity affirmation, or an incoherent political screed blaming educated women and immigrants for problems.

i take pictures on vacation sometimes, but generally stuff that is just for me to remember a detail that would blur into the trip years later. the place in western new mexico i stopped to get gas that was 45°F on a summer morning. the brand new but absolutely shot-to-shit forest service trail sign leading back into town. little chronological markers. sometimes i take a picture of signage to remember the exact feature so i can look up info later.

it feels very different than, as you describe, the people walking around with their phones, watching the penguins through the camera hoping to capture some meme-worthy moment digitally while ignoring the rich analog happening around them. i can also tell you, my family for the most part does not go back and look through old photos. they do accumulate them on old laptops and ask for help migrating them over to new computers, with helpful names like "New Folder (3)", "old phone", "2010" and "Europe". and as they age, they can't really place where the pictures were taken in their own memory, because all they remember is focusing taking the picture... not their surroundings or the context. so there's like a poorly framed picture of some building or a town that looks distinct and interesting, but nobody knows where or what it is. multiply that by 1000.

it's a rare and talented person with incredible equipment who can get a really good photo of a feature or place that also conveys the energy, vibe, and emotion of those who behold it. and fortunately, those people exist, do that and sell photos online that can be framed, etc. not to mention, people paint and sculpt things to that can be souvenirs. and for going down a more informal memory lane, one can nearly always look up the place they went online and look at the tagged photos others have uploaded to be reminded. so all the individual camera wielding feels counter productive to memory making when there, in the present.