Memory, photography and social media

Antony Funnell: Hello and welcome to Future Tense, Antony Funnell here with the second last in our series of summer highlight programmes the very best of the past year or so.

There's a room I particularly like in the New Zealand city of Dunedin. It's in the newly refurbished Otago Settlers Museum. It's an old room, high ornate ceilings, polished wooden floors, and around the walls are hundreds of paintings and photographs, a sea of early European settlers; emotionless, stiff, Victorian faces staring out into an unknown future.

At first glance the images look uniform and impenetrable, but as you begin to stare at them you realise just how expressive they really are, that they speak of so much more than they first let on; of history and hope, of class and of struggle.

Of course the photograph has always been more than just a captured image, a simple record of times past. But has our relationship with the photo changed significantly in the digital era? That's what we're keen to explore on today's program.

Today of course we take, alter, crop and share photos like never before. And we use them as badges, symbols of who we are and how we feel. But haven't photographs always been as much about message as memory?

UK-based naturalist Paul Evans has a theory. He reckons our modern obsession with digital capture and display links directly back to a very 19th century desire to curate the natural world.

Paul Evans: Say go back to Darwin. When he went off on the Beagle to discover as much about global wildlife as he possibly could, the things that he brought back had to be displayed in particular ways. So plants were collected and pressed so that they became two-dimensional, insects were collected and killed and then set into idealised forms. You know, you've seen those butterfly collections where the wings are perfectly symmetrical, and beetles where the legs are perfectly symmetrical. And I think what happened with photography is that it emerged from a similar aesthetic.

And for me the aesthetic of gathering, of capture, is a transformative thing. You take something, as it were, from the wild, and you re-present it, you represent it in a different sort of way. So in your collection, in your cabinet of curiosities, in your natural history collection you display your captives in a particular way according to a particular aesthetic. And I think with photography more and more what we do is to find a way of taking things from the wild and displaying them through a different sort of aesthetic so they are transformed, they become something else.

Antony Funnell: And so in that sense the photos that we are now taking and we are now pasting to sites like Instagram and Tumblr and Facebook, they say as much about us as they do about the images that they represent.

Paul Evans: Yes they do, they're telling a really interesting story about us, and they seem to exist somewhere between inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness. You know, for 80,000 years we were hunter gatherers. Well, a lot of people on Earth still are. And there's that very short and interesting gap between being curious about something and needing to acquire it. I suppose it comes from finding things to eat, finding medicine, finding things that we think are valuable that we can trade, all these things are ways of attributing value to things that we find in the environment.

Read the original post:
Memory, photography and social media