Digital narcissism? How selfies killed the art of photography — RT Op-Edge

Digital narcissism? How selfies killed the art of photography — RT Op-Edge



Digital photography has gone from merely sucking in the world around the owner of the capture device to sucking in the owner as well. Rather than enriching the visual record of our lives, the potential for instant and endless digital capture may now be cheapening it.



I fell in love when I was 15. I was walking down the corridor of our school with some of my friends when She walked by. It was instantaneous: I was smitten. And I pretty much stayed smitten for the next 15 years. 



In the end we got married, and happily so – but not to each other. 



The only photographic evidence I have to show for all my years of wasted heartache is a Polaroid snap someone took of us at a party. I never met the person who took it, but I assume it was an art student. It was taken at an angle into a broken mirror with Her looking beautiful and unobtainable on one side of the fracture, and me looking lost and a bit blurred on the other.



I now understand that in terms of photography, my formative years were spent around the midway point between the Victorians and Snapchat. The technology existed for someone to sneak a shot of you without you noticing, but not for them to make it immediately accessible to 7 billion people.



The watershed point in this development arc was the advent of digital photography.



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