Smile, for the camera?

I am sure that whoever invented the camera saw it as something momentous, a giant leap on the path of progress. And so perhaps it is- only, recently I am far from well disposed towards the said piece of gadgetry. In fact, I see it as a menace to society.

Or rather, it is the way in which a camera is used that makes it so very harmful. It makes society somehow plastic.

The very fact of the accessibility of a camera means that it is present on all occasions, regardless of their importance, the degree of their formality. Photos are taken left right and center- merely for the sake of it. Women, girls, flock around the lens in the most asinine poses imaginable, tittering and giggling and making an unbelievable fuss over the final product. I have seen full-blown catfights start over photographs. And for the one unfortunate enough to be not very photogenic, and thus unwilling to be photographed every so often, ostracism, being labeled “odd” follows almost inevitably.

Digital cameras have taken vanity and affected posturing to whole new levels. Caught up in the desire to take a picture, people quite often create entire scenes around a lens, going to great lengths to convey glamour to what is essentially, nothing…they say that they are capturing memories, but in reality they are dissembling. One day, years later when the event itself is forgotten and the photo somehow emerges, they will laugh at what they believe to be a real moment; they will believe their own lies, their own masquerades, created solely for the lens. These pictures warp the past.

At some truly beautiful times, photography ruins the moment. We have all seen the fiasco created by cameramen at weddings. A wedding is supposed to be an important part of people’s lives, a landmark.

Our unnatural zeal for photography has defiled the beauty of the occasion. Cameramen flock around the poor, flustered couple, demanding they position themselves just so, and then hold the pose for unbelievably long periods of time. Video cameras seem never to leave the bride; as if the day itself were not event enough, she must now be exposed to the cold scrutiny of a lens, forced to be unnatural and posing, it seems, almost non-stop. All throughout the occasion, cameramen jostle around the place, displacing guests, hogging the stage, issuing orders to the couple to ensure they are just right for the picture/video.

In the end, what is it all for? For the sake of a video, a couple of hundred photographs, all of in which the bride is ill at ease, smiling when she would rather not, caught with private tears on her cheeks? Are these the “memories” one should have of a wedding? A nightmare of posing and posturing, one big dissemble? Would it not be better for all concerned if these boisterous cameramen were omitted entirely, creating a more natural environment, with memories in which people were smiling because they were happy, not because there was a lens pointed towards them?

What this craze for snapping photos has done is undermine the moment itself in an attempt at capturing it In this tidal wave of photographing different moments, all of which are made out to be momentous, how do you differentiate truth from make-believe? When looking at a photo of smiling people, I find myself wondering if these tokens of happiness are real or manufactured. If there is ambiguity now in the simple fact of a smile, if we are so used to faked postures that even this simple gesture can no longer be trusted, clearly something is very seriously wrong.