Pic or it didn’t happen

In capturing the moment, do we actually lose it?

It’s hard to fully appreciate something now without wanting to document it.

We know it’s fleeting, like everything, and yet we want to hold onto it somehow. We call it “capturing” when we take a photo, and that’s often the feeling. Like we’re scooping up the moment before it gets away.

“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” - C.S. Lewis

Photographing beauty is an attempt to receive it into ourselves. But does it satisfy that thing we can hardly put into words? Or does it offload the experience into another container, from our heads to an external machine?

And that’s before we’ve even shared the photo. Unsatisfied with being the sole witness of our own experience, we post it. The moment is then flattened, edited, skewed by how others react to it.

We’ve been photographing our lives long before social media existed. Our photos are memories, reminders of what we’ve done and where we’ve been. But now most of those moments are a tap away. We can swipe through our phone or social media profiles and arrive, in seconds, at pictures ourselves from decades ago. Before, you had to dig through boxes or flip through albums to revisit the past. Now we’re seeing it again and again, on Instagram, our camera rolls, in auto-generated videos our phone sends us unprompted.

Are we meant to be that close to the past versions of ourselves?

Do we remember what happened in that one beautiful moment, or are we remembering the photo of it?

In her memoir, “Blue Nights,” Joan Didion wrote:

“I continue opening boxes. I find more faded and cracked photographs than I ever want to see... In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.”

In some cases I look back at a photo and I’m grateful to have it. It makes me feel closer to a certain person or time long gone. But often the memory itself does more, or a journal entry, or reminiscing with a friend. Or: the moment dissolves with with no photo proof and little recollection of its details. And that’s okay, because hopefully it means I wasn’t thinking about documenting it as it happened. I was just living it.