What’s in a Picture?

Smile

We are in Jerusalem this week, and like all good tourists to Jerusalem we did the ‘religious’ sites today.

So at 10am it was The Church of the Holy Sepulchre (above).

At noon it was The Wailing Wall

and at 2pm it was Al Aksa Mosque and The Dome of the Rock.

That’s a lot of religion for one day, but I don’t want to deal with that part. Rather, I was mesmerized by the number of people taking pictures, 99% of them with small point-and-shoot cameras or cell phones.

As an exercise, we sat at the entrance to the tomb where Jesus was reputed to have been buried (above) and watched as thousands (quite literally) of people came by, paused for a moment, took out their small cameras and recorded what was essentially the same shot – over and over and over and over.

This went on for some time, and one can only assume that this goes on all day, every day, 365 days a year.

And of course, it’s not just the Tomb of Jesus. It’s everything.  Billions of ubiquitous images worldwide, every day, 24-hours a day.

Where does it all go?

What happens to all those billions of images?

Once photography was harder…not really complex, but 35mm film with its 36 exposures, its need to be processed and made into prints and the cost associated with that created a kind of natural parameter or set of limitations for photography. There was a cost, albeit relatively small, for each exposure made – and there were a limited number of exposures per roll of film

Today, as a consequence of the digital revolution, all that is gone.  Now there is effectively no limit to the number of exposures you can take.

And what happens to all the images?

Once they were something real and solid. You might have put them in an album or just kept them in a shoebox.  But they were real.  You could pull them out years later and recall things you had forgotten. They had an archival sense to them.

Most of Jerusalem’s Old City is filled with tourist crap – T-shirts or plastic shoes or food stalls. But, almost by accident we found Kevork Kahvadejian‘s photo store on Al-Khanka street.

This is the kind of hidden gem that you have to really look hard to find.

Kahvadejian’s father was a photographer in Jerusalem in the 1920s and 30s, and he took thousands of exposures of the City then, many on glass plates.  The son has painstakingly reproduced the images and sells the prints.  (We bought two).

They represent a fascinating visual history of Jerusalem.

The collection reminded me of Ken Burn’s father’s collection of Civil War photos and how they became the basis for The Civil War, the TV series.  Someone could do the same with these.

But more than that, they reminded me of the value of physical prints  and negatives, even if they are kept in a box in the closet – they are something that will last, at least for some time.

How long do digital images last?  No one really knows.

And the billions of digital images we are collecting now?  Where will they end up? Or indeed, what is the point in them, not to seem too harsh.

Kahvadejian’s father was an artist, and the work shows it. People who pull out an iPhone and click off a quick shot are not artists, nor do they pretend to be as much.

They don’t take their digital photos to create art – they do it as a kind of affirmation that “I was here”.  It only takes a second.

Yet something is lost if you don’t think and compose the shot.  If it does not represent something beyond, “I was here”.

We’re busy trying to drive video into the realm of fine art, but ironically as we do that, perhaps photography is doing something completely different.  Perhaps it no longer wants to be an art, but rather a universal experience in which the actual quality of the image is far less significant the affirmation of ‘I was here’, and that is more than enough.

At the Dome of the Rock you can feel the indentation that Mohammed’s horse made in the granite.  At the Wailing Wall, you can touch the wall.  The Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre is real. It  is marble. Believe  all of it or none of it… you can feel it on your fingers.

Were it a digital tomb, would there still be millions coming to see it, or still believing?