Addiction, Irrationality, and Photography

      a world where "time is of the essence," speed is praised and efficiency rewarded, seldom do we have the energy or freedom to truly be present with what's in front of us until they become mere memories if anything at all. This is why we turn to our cameras for help—to capture the moments that will inevitably fade from our finite minds but we're too afraid to let go of. How little faith we have in ourselves and our capacity to remember that high-resolution camera quality is made an enticing selling point for cellphone manufacturers. But no matter how much we capture, document, and immortalize moments of our lives, we will never be able to fully arrive at the truth to which our photographs attempt to teleport us and we have slid into depths of no return while driving ourselves into madness trying to do so.

It is true, what Susan Sontag claims in her work, On Photography: "In Plato's Cave," about how "needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted" (Sontag 24). The way we all walk with our hands clasped around our cell phones, ready to whip out them out at the slightest intrigue in our surroundings. I am no exception, as I hold multiple Instagram Instagram accounts to my name wanting to participate in such aesthetic consumerist addiction, thinking to myself If I don't take pictures of my bullet journal, my talent doesn't even exist. How absurd is that? But I won't stop there; I used to have around 18 more photos than I do on my Instagram feed right now because I just didn't like them anymore. How do I know it's 18 exactly? I archived them all because I can't bring myself to delete them completely. I also refuse to delete my Snapchat app even though I hate doing my "streaks" because I don't want to lose the memories that I've saved in there, bringing me back to happier times but reminding me that my life will never return to what had been.

My cats doing absolutely nothing = Me saving multiple copies of it to forever live in my Snapchat Memories

Dear Photograph is a book by Taylor Jones that asks for submissions of photos of photos, drawing on themes of the past and nostalgia.

While sentimental and beautiful, it depicts and affirms realities that will never be real again

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MARCH 15, 2021

IN

| riding Saturn's rings | 3rd stop |

While Sontag claims that "photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism" (18), this barely scratches the surface of why we are addicted to photography. No, it's not really our sense of sentimentalism and nostalgia that is driving us to a state of madness—it's our fear. Fear that we may be called a liar. Fear that we might forget. In fact, it's so strong that it fuels our addiction to photography and then in return, it fuels our irrationality, trapping us in a vicious and never-ending cycle of self-inflicted torture and turning ourselves "into image-junkies" (24) and hoarders. Think about it— how often have you ran into the issue of needing to clear up phone storage but being unable to delete any old photos? But no amount of capturing, revisiting, coaxing, pleading, and probing can ever bring back to moments of my past, as it's merely "an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal" (9). The moments we've lived will cease to exist the second that it passes and will never be able to exist in a photograph as it had before.

Ultimately, revisiting photographs we've taken is like picking at a scab; we're constantly reopening a wound, trying to probe at it like it can give us anything more than a painful memory of what used to be but has since dissolved with time. We so desperately use photos to capture the truth but it just reminds us of how far we actually are from it. But we don't realize that "photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is" (34), which perfectly alludes to Plato's allegory of the cave where the prisoners (us) are only able to see the shadows in front of them when in reality, they are at the mercy of the puppeteers marching figures in front of a fire behind them. We are the prisoners, shackled by an uncontrolled need to see, perceive, and relive a bygone reality. We're being manipulated by the "industrial society", as Sontag puts it, unable to even think to question the fact that our measly attempts at photography can't ever represent the truth in the way we want it to.

Sontag reinforces this as she calls "each still photograph [a] privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again" (18), and again, and again. But there is no way to bring us out of our stupor—we're too far gone into our addiction to immortalizing our histories that there is literally nothing we can do other than to keep taking pictures and perpetually feeding our addiction. At this point in our fervour, all we can do is try and recognize it and that remember that we're doing nothing but chasing an empty promise of reality and truly learn what it means to be present to live the truth we desperately try in vain to preserve.

References
Jones, Taylor. Dear Photograph. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publ, 2012.

Sontag, Susan. “In Plato's Cave.” On Photography, Penguin, 2019, pp. 3–24

Media:
Dear Photograph: https://dearphotograph.com/

Plato's Allegory of the Cave: https://iagtm.pressbooks.com/chapter/story-platos-allegory-of-the-cave/

Plato's Cave Allegory