“Wait, smile!”
I had the best birthday weekend of my life a couple weeks ago. 72 hours perfectly curated to include dancing in a club til the wee hours of the morning, sharing a meal my mother made with my family, giggling with friends over cocktails, and screaming the lyrics of my new favourite song at a concert. Perfection! I still look back on my camera roll and smile down on the multitude of photos from mobile phones, film and digital cameras. It’s almost overwhelming how many photos we took.
As I’ve been catching up with other friends who weren’t able to celebrate with me, and running them through my photos, a few of them have asked me what I have been asking myself, “why haven’t you posted any of these yet?”. It’s the thing to do, right? You have a fun time, so you post it. But what is the actual point? I know I had fun, everyone who was there knows we had fun, so what's the posting for? Why ask for your attention when there are far more important things to be paying attention to? I could try to delude myself by saying “so my family and friends can see what I’m up to” but I see them often enough and show them photos when I so, so that’s not the reason. Why do I do it? Why do any of us do it?
And before you tense up, I am not speaking to you from a high horse, it’s a diminutive donkey at best. With my phone in my pocket and my point and shoot film camera to hand at any given moment, I am often the photographer of my friend group saying “wait, smile!” before the blinding flash goes off. I enjoy taking pictures of the people I love and looking back at them fondly. Therefore, this is by no means an anti-camera / anti-posting piece, for I’d be reduced to a poor craftsman blaming my tools, instead it's an inquiry into our relationship with cameras, audiences and whether we actually know where the line is between documentation and performance.
I was raised by a Facebook Mum. Every outing across my childhood would entail her saying, “cheeeeese” every ten minutes and everyone stopping what they're doing to face the camera with a smile, which explains why this apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Though it was irritating at times, especially as I got into my angsty teenage years, I am so grateful that she kept a visual account of my personal history from her perspective. This is one of the joys of documenting through photography, my mum now has many albums filled with images of her children as we have grown up and formed into who we are now - inspiring me to make my own albums.
Two years ago, my Gogo, my mother’s mother, passed away. Towards the end of her life, her memory was foggy and her comprehension skills slowed down, so my mum would show her photos from her life: places she had been to, people she had met, to remind her of the colourful life she lived. Since Gogo passed, my mother has become a grandmother herself, and now she is even more precious over her photos. Whenever my niece or nephew does something adorable, which is more often than not, my mum rushes to get her phone out and if she fails to capture the moment she was looking for, she takes it as a loss.What was once endearing, has now become something more heartbreaking.
One time, when my niece was playing with her toys, she did something impressive (couldn’t tell you what it was now, but for a two year old, it was very cool). Those of us who were watching let out an array of enthusiastic and highly animated “ooh”s and “wow”s, so naturally the FOMO grabbed my mother by the collar and carried her into the room with the rest of us. She arrived with phone in hand, camera on, and said to my niece “can you do it again for me?”. I gently covered her phone camera and said“Mama, it’s okay, just let her play”. Thankfully, my niece was too focused on her task to hear the request, so she continued on unfazed. “But these are memories” she replied, and that’s when I understood - she is scared of forgetting, just like her mother did.
At the end of the day, heck, at the start of the day, all we have is each other, and our photos are a way to cement the ones we have loved into our personal archive. The very thought of the chance my mother may not recognise me one day causes my chest to tighten, but I am concerned by what the fear of forgetting in the future means for our present. In that moment, my mum’s desire to keep a memory for herself was so strong that she was willing to get my niece to perform what she had just done, killing the moment completely, instead of letting us bask in what we just witnessed.
I had a similar event occur when I was out with my girls one night. We were dancing away, acting a fool as per usual. I was deep into the flow as I twirled around with one friend, but that flow was abruptly interrupted when another friend placed a bright light in my face. She was about to start recording and she went “do it again!”. “What are you doing?” I asked, and she said “it’s for the dump!” She could tell by my facial expression that I was not as excited by this idea as she was, so she put her phone away and we continued dancing all together. The dump is our generation’s digital, and far more casual, successor to our parents' hefty photo albums - a moodboard of your most recent month, filled with aesthetically pleasing highlights. On that dancefloor, I felt the same grievance with my friend, as I did with my mum. I didn’t want to halt the moment just to re-enact it for an invisible future audience.
I am no better than my mum or my friend because I know I have done the same. So where is the line between documenting your life and performing it? Perhaps it lies within your intention? Or perspective? I suspect it is parallel to the line between participant and spectator. In both examples, the mood shifted when the person with the camera moved from being with us, to watching us. It’s the difference between sharing and observing. Unfortunately, I fear we know this “observer” view so well because we are constantly spectating ourselves, trying to suss out how we appear to new onlookers. When addressing this phenomenon within the context of women and our relationship to patriarchy, Margaret Atwood said, “you are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur”. I feel the same applies to all of us when it comes to perceiving ourselves. You are a person with an audience inside watching a person. There is an audience that we have in mind whilst we take a photo, even if that photo never reaches one, even if the only audience member is you.
Previously, I would have argued that cameras do not belong on dancefloors, especially as someone who has been interrupted many times when I just want to commune with myself in the music!! However, I recently went to Bernice Mulenga’s photography exhibition, “LMK When You Reach” at Auto Italia, which showcased their photos from dancefloors, some that I had been on, that centre queer Black people, and this reminded me what I love about photography. This was the documentation and celebration of a vibrant, and sadly, marginalised, community in this city. The images were intimate without being intrusive or disruptive. There was a clear co-creation through trust between the people on either side of the camera. In an interview for PLASTER, they said “if you don’t document, you are forgotten.” There it is again, the fear of being forgotten, but on the other side of this coin, there is the joy of creating your memory! Given that we place so much value on what we can see, what we decide to showcase reveals what is important to us. Mulenga’s work documents this community because it is important to their story and in turn, they have solidified their perspective into visual art history.
Taking it back to the idea of an audience for a moment, my discomfort with posting on Instagram is because I am so aware that when I post, I am asking you to look at me, so I want to make your split second of attention worth it! Some use Instagram to show how they are thriving, others of us are striving towards our desired careers, and others use it as a tool for surviving. The same phone camera that I use to take photos of the spread of plates at my birthday dinner, is the same phone a teenager is using to show me how their family is continually exploited to mine for minerals in Congo. Performance vs documentation. So here we all are, in a variety of contexts, using the same app for very different reasons and I feel guilty about that. I don’t want to post and draw attention to myself when there are causes to engage with, but it is self-righteous of me to think my mere lack of posting changes the world when I know that organising in the local community is what will do it (has done it, is doing it, will continue to do it). That said, this isn’t my green flag to bombard your feed with nonsense lol.
Take the pictures and post the pictures. Or just take the pictures. Or do neither of these things. Honestly, do what you want. Performance isn’t always a bad thing, and documentation isn’t always necessary, I just think it’s important we know which we are doing, and try our best not to pose one as the other, for we run the risk of losing a grip on reality for the sake of an invisible audience. I know for a fact that I will keep taking photos of anything and everything, especially when it comes to my family and friends! Some will go in my photo albums, some may make it online, many will end up in my recently deleted. I just look forward to creating more memories of joy, I hope you are too.
Love!
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