The camera-phone has inaugurated an era of therapeutic photography. It is a photography less concerned with producing photographs and more concerned with the act of taking a picture, the “click.” In Snapchat, the actual photo disappears after being taken and sent. It is the mode of most of our iPhone habits. We look at group photos, selfies, and food shots for a few seconds before we consign them to the Camera Roll, where they only matter when they pile up and prevent us from taking more pictures.
This thought first struck me during a visit to London’s National Gallery, where I found my gaze shift from the paintings to the people viewing them. They would drift toward a painting, stop, read the placard, lift their smartphone, click, and move on to repeat the process for the next work of art that caught their eye. The whole ritual took about fifteen seconds—twenty, if the work was famous enough to merit a selfie.
One could hardly argue that these pictures were taken for the sake of memory. There was no activity within the fifteen-second rite to be remembered—nothing outside of the picture-taking itself. It would be equally unconvincing to argue that this kind of photography is an act of record-keeping, as if my generation enters museums with a mind to making digital backups. There are always better versions online, and besides, any digital copy can only be a reference to the work itself. Who would want a reference to an object only looked at for a few seconds?
