Graphic illustration of why the rise of photography…
…has coincided with a rise in the rate of depression.
The ravages of time didn’t used to be so well-documented.
Then again—there’s a genre of YouTube videos that feature the morphing of photos of the same person over a long period of time, showing the aging process with its attendant sags, bags, folds, and blotches. But watching a bunch of them, my strongest impression was one of continuity rather than change. The person—eyes, expression, essence, je ne sais quoi—remains.
And if you start out beautiful/handsome to begin with, sometimes you end up pretty beautiful/handsome a lot of years later. Here’s a married couple morphing:
From “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…
Smaller glasses looked better on the wife!
I think that the proliferation of communication and advertising has lead to greater incidents of depression. As my mother says, she grew up poor, but didn’t know it since everyone else was poor too.
We live better than the kings of old did, better than the vast majority of people who ever walked this earth. If anything, perhaps our loss of faith has contributed to it. If this is all there is, well, this kinda sucks then.
Uhhhhh…. I don’t think I HAVE that many photos of myself.
I guess YouTube draws the narcissists among us…
Not to carp, Neo, but I don’t know if I’d call the relationship between photography and depression rates causal or even anything other than coincidental. I’d think that it’s simply become more tolerable societally to admit to the amount of depression; there’s no longer such a stigma involved with it. Look at the acceptance and even worship that’s aimed at tragic creative artistic types.
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On a different note: It’s amazing what view we impose on photography that are in actuality the viewpoints of the audience. It’s definitely true that photography has enabled mankind to document change in a frank manner previous generations were unable to achieve. The linked videos are two firm examples of this. But as Neo pointed out, another thing that it’s enabled people to do is document continuity. In so much that changes, there’s so much that stays the same and can be seen in photographs. While the famous Kahn collection of autochromes from the early 20th century (http://citynoise.org/article/10598) definitely do show age, there are multiple elements of them that make you think “10 years ago” instead of 100, and that’s even despite the anachronistic feel imparted by the tonal character of the coloration technology used. Elements of a photograph that humans previously trained themselves to think of as “ancient” due to being seen monochromatically suddenly take on a more contemporary feel, despite being every bit as old as other grayscale pictures of that time. And because the coloration allows people to bridge the time gap, mundane elements such as shading, colors, and the like suddenly make elements of those photos that predate most of our grandparents seem accessible, even vaguely familiar, despite the settings. Photography somehow manages to document both change and continuity without contradiction, and that’s an amazing thing.
I like seeing change as documented by photographs, but at the same time, there’s an interesting element introduced when change is juxtaposed with continuity; Werning’s above linked photo essay “Back to the Future” certainly demonstrates this. It certainly makes for interesting musings about all that changes and all that stays the same.