How too many became the enemy of too good

“You went to that gorgeous party, with all those celebrities, and you don’t have a single picture,” expostulated my neighbor, Mrs Gillibrand, an inexhaustible fount of curiosity about all that ever goes on in our community. Her exasperation was writ large on her knitted brow. Everybody is a photographer today. Practically everybody owns a smartphone, even kids from less affluent families, and there is no smartphone worth the name that can’t take pictures. The gadgets are improving fast too, and many are developing sophisticated features to help the picture-taker. Alongside is developing the expectation that people ought to record all that is happening around them. My neighbor is no exception. If I attend a wedding, I am expected to be able to show shots of the couple, famous guests, a dancing crowd, the ceremony, even the wedding cake. If I attend a funeral, I must attest to my presence by shooting, if not the deceased, the grieving widow, moaning family and collapsing friends. medium nocaption90121455No amount of recycling can solve the problem of the huge amount of trash we create in the world, besides what we dump in lakes and oceans. Do we really need more? Any Facebook and Instagram enthusiast, not to mention the TikTok and SnapChat aficionado, who attends any event of consequence – which apparently includes the last pie that emerged from her oven or the first hamburger that went into his maw – must document it abundantly, gratuitously and “to the last syllable of recorded time.” Where one shot of a smiling face would suffice, we are supplied a dozen. If surfeit weren’t enough to bother, the abysmal quality of the photos distracts. The vast army of newborn photographers have no concern with ‘exposure value’ and haven’t possibly heard of ‘depth of field.’ They happily defy the rules of framing and composition. They press a button and publish the eyesore results. The surprising thing is that they don’t seem to notice the difference between beauty and blight. Why don’t they ever edit their insufferable output? Every phone has an app to crop the photo, change the lighting, increase the sharpness and improve the contrast. The avid shutterbugs never seem to bother using it. Granted that not all photographers need to reach a professional standard; one expects though they would not take leave of their eyes and eliminate the clearly hideous shots. medium nocaption90121475Since digital cameras make it easy and inexpensive to take photos, I have a simple rule. I promptly delete 80% of the photos I take; of the rest, I heavily edit at least one half. These thoughts came to me with some force when I accidentally opened an envelope last night and came across some old photos. These are mostly pictures of friends and family, especially of my children when they were young. They are simple pictures, meant only for private use and not for a gallery, but what joy it was to see them again! Because they are simple photos, but lovingly composed and thoughtfully edited, each of them told a story and lifted my heart. What beautiful things photos can be! When good cameras were costly and bulky objects, and photos were expensive to print, we seemed to take some minimal care in taking pictures of people and things. When new technology removed the need for an exposure meter and gave us a huge latitude in light-sensitivity, we forgot to pay attention to the light; now most people let their cameras decide the exposure for them. When further technology gave our cameras the capability to calculate the focus, we forgot the whole business of focus and never learned that focus too, like light, is a matter of judgment. Yes, technology has made photography easier if your goal is to consistently produce mediocre stuff. Good photos still require a modicum of effort: some learning and a touch of skill. medium nocaption90121547And then, in a flash, came to me the real difference between then and now. Then we took fewer pictures with greater care. Now we take tons and tons of pictures, with scant concern about the process and no care. We have replaced scarcity with plenty, which may seem a good thing, but we have also replaced attention with indifference, an eye for quality with a taste for crudity, a preference for vulgar abundance over discriminate choice. I look at my home and realise the huge profusion of things that I have not used in a long while and probably never will. Whether it is shoes or clothes or razors, I have many more than my father or grandfather could have dreamed of. Does it add to the quality of my life any more than it could have enriched my forefathers’? I have strong doubts. I have trouble finding what I need, I waste time making choices that hardly make me happier or my life more worthwhile. More is not necessarily better, though people dogged by memories of scarcity are liable to be tempted by it. More pictures might have pleased my curious neighbor, Mrs Gillibrand, but they would have added little to the world.Manish Nandy focuses on the magic of human relationships, even across national frontiers.The views expressed by the author in the piece are his ownMore from the author:- The real difference with the differently abled- How pride and prejudice come in the way of being a better person- When I went looking for the meaning of my dreams...- What leads good people to take their own life?