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Notes -
Against Photography
When I think back on the best time of my life, I always come back to the fall of 2015. I’d overcome some of the most noxious parts of my adolescent personality and finally established some solid friendships. It was my senior year of high school and I’d gotten most of the hard classes and tests out of the way, leaving time for subjects I loved like biology and global literature, with the added bonus that my homework load was far lower, especially compared to the year before when I was taking an early-bird extra class. And perhaps most importantly, at least for me at the time, was that I was running extremely well. I had started taking an iron-supplement over the summer at the behest of my coach, stopped playing video games, and started cross-training to up my aerobic volume. In the first meet of the season I loped 40 seconds off my 3 mile PR, and then the next weekend axed another 35, going from a 16:00 to a 14:45 in the span of 2 weeks. I ended up being all-state that year, and I credit that season for getting me into MIT and transforming my mindset around running and life.
The fall of 2025 was exactly ten years since that season, and so for much of these past few months I have been in a reflective mood, seeking out old friends from that time, scouring record books, and examining photos and videos of those races. While this reflection was generally a positive experience: I’ve been reinspired to commit fully to endurance training, and realized that one my old teammates lives in DC, it also brought with it a fairly terrifying realization. Most of my memories of that time are not actual memories, but memories of photographs and videos of those moments. I don’t remember coming up the final stretch at Detweiler Park during the state meet, but I sure as hell remember the photograph of me passing a Sandburg runner right before crossing the line. I don’t remember what it was like during the triathlon I did that summer, but I do remember the photo I took with my coach after. I don’t remember the gag gifts pasta party we organized as captains, but I do remember the blurry photo I took of my friend Zack holding a wrapped dildo that we planned to give out. The clear memories that I do have: sitting on the floor of the bus talking to my coach as we drove back from Peoria, performing Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis in English class, doing math proofs on the way back from California, or eating watermelon after summer long runs on the Des Plaines river trail were never captured in photographs. Those that have, have been distorted and impoverished, reduced to a flat, third-person copy of what that memory originally was or could have been.
It’s not surprising that this happens. Memories tend to distort over time anyway, as you begin to recall the memory itself rather than the actual event. Thus, all memories tend to distort and narrow; even the above things that I do remember independent of photographs are indistinct, a few images, a smell, a feeling. Yet all of them still come from inside of me, not from detached third person observer. I don’t want to replace my memories with photographs, my first person experience with fragments of my life captured as if they happened to someone else.
It’s not just the corruption of memories that’s made me sour on photography. 2015 was three years after the iPhone year zero of 2012. Everyone had a phone with a front and forward facing camera with Facebook and Instagram installed. People were taking a lot of photos even back then. But in the ten years since things seem to have gotten exponentially worse. It seems like many in my generation are in constant documentary mode: every meal, every pretty sunrise on every morning run, every meeting at the brewery with friends makes its way into a photo that’s shared on a social media platform or in a group chat. At best this is a misguided attempt to hold onto the present moment, at worst it is a commodification of real life for the benefit of one’s personal brand or online persona. In either case, the act of capturing the photo creates separation: both between you and the people you’re with, and between you and authentic experience. When you take a photo you step out of the flow of your life into the chair of an observer. Done too frequently I think that represents a genuine loss.
Of course it’s not like I’m particularly good at putting this into practice. Before I went to Madrid this year I told myself I wouldn’t take any photos. I broke this rule quite quickly: both to send things to my mom and for attention fodder on Instagram and Strava. I too am just as much a slave to the exhibitionist world we all find ourselves in. But this year I hope to do better. Take less photographs, make more memories. Do more things out of genuine passion and curiosity, and less because they look good on a screen for other people. Live more in time A and less in time B.
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You may (or may not) appreciate Walker Percy's The Loss of the Creature.
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