Put It Away!

What exactly are you filming?

   This is treacherous ground for me to be covering, and risks hypocrisy, but there has recently been a lot of debate over the use of cameras (particularly camera phones) and obsessive recording behaviour (ORB) at public events, and whether this is right, wrong, or necessary.

   I enjoy taking photographs. However, when I go out to events, or work on projects specifically to take photographs, I take the necessary equipment and get images to meet my brief. For everything else, I leave my cameras at home. I appear to be part of a minority though, as I discovered during the Notting Hill Carnival which has just passed. 

   There were over one million people at the carnival. Some of this number were professional photographers, videographers and film crews covering and documenting the events. They were there to capture the images and use their skills and expertise to get the best images they could. Then there were people like myself, who are building up their portfolios, enjoy photographing events but don't do it as a profession, or are students of photography etc, either way, all have gone specifically with photographing the event in mind. Finally, there are the people who went to the carnival in a social capacity. 

   It's this last group which is causing major issues for professionals, companies and businesses. The proliferation of the digital camera, now primarily found built into a mobile phone, means that almost everyone has a camera on hand. Obviously, this does have it's benefits, like turning the camera back on the surveillance state or capturing those spontaneous news moments which would otherwise be missed. But, this access to a recording device has had a strange effect on many people, by turning them into compulsive recorders. Camera zombies.

   From what I saw over the weekend, there seems to be a need to record everything. And I mean everything. I watched people standing and staring at the carnival procession…only they weren't watching it directly, they were watching it via the three inch screen held up in front of their face. Or they were randomly filming the mass of people, with no real subject  or purpose other than, I presume, proving that they were there. Which begs the questions: why did you bother going? Why not just watch clips on YouTube if you want to view everything on a screen? And what are you filming it for anyway; who is going to want to watch a shaky low-resolution clip of the backs of people's heads?

   These issues have been plaguing music and comedy gigs of late, with more and more performers demanding their audiences stop recording everything and just enjoy themselves. There are very obvious issues with this constant recording: you spend all of your time thinking about and setting up the recording you're making, rather than actually experiencing the event itself. Worse, these recordings often undermine the work of professionals employed to record the events. And, ultimately, all you have afterward is some mediocre (at best) footage of something which you will only remember through the prism of that recording. 

   Back in Notting Hill, and this one example perhaps encapsulates this obsession with recording; I saw a man spinning on the spot, his iPhone raised arbitrarily above his head as he tried to film what was going on around him (a queue for a toilet, a jerk chicken stall, some people sitting on the pavement...and about 300 other people all filming each other, filming each other, filming nothing). This footage will not have been great, and probably won't be worth viewing again. If all this footage was available to the state (and after the Edward Snowden revelation's, it could well be) then we'd never need CCTV again. 

   So why did he do it? Because he could. Because the technology is there in his hand and something, some desire within our nature, made him feel the need to record a video, to prove he was there. To prove he existed. Ironically, however, everyone around him was doing the same thing, to the extent that nobody seemed to notice anyone. This desire to record is now degrading experiences. It's time to put it away and ask yourself: is this really worth recording? What can I capture that won't be done better by someone else?

This image from the Pope's address at the Vatican is probably the most revealing example of how bad it has become.

You can view my own images from The Notting Hill Carnival at www.henrywrwhite.co.uk