I've been pondering another societal norm that I've noticed in the last few years. It has to do with cameras.
What? Cameras?
Let me begin back when I was in 6th grade. A very, l-o-n-g time ago. Not mentioning any years.
We took a little field trip to a national park near our town. I was so thrilled to have a camera to take. I think it was a little 110. Can't remember for sure. I used a WHOLE roll of film! Then I had to pay to get it developed and wait for it to come back. I loved those pictures, even typing on the back of them what they were. Which was good, because years later, if I hadn't had the info on the back I would have had no idea what the picture was of. Was I in any of the pictures? Yes, one. Out of 24, probably. The rest were of the landscapes, wildlife and scenery, and a couple of my friends.
Fast forward to today in our digital imaging age. My young teenaged daughter got a camera for Christmas a couple of years ago, and I've had one for a few years. While I love the ease of picture taking and deleting the not so good images, I hate storing thousands of digital images on my computer that are never going to be printed. But that's not my issue. Here's what I've noticed that has me scratching my head. While I tend to take pictures of my kids and things we do, I've noticed that the teen and early-mid 20's crowd tend to take pictures of . . . . .themselves.
Why is that? It honestly never enters my mind to take tons of pictures of myself in various poses and various states of dress. In fact, if it ever enters my mind to take a picture of myself I quickly throw that thought out, thinking how puffy I look in pictures. But I don't think that taking pictures of myself would be something I would do even if I wasn't 'puffy', if I was not overweight and out of shape.
What drives people to photograph themselves all the time? I believe that it is a product of our 'it's all about me' society. This generation of people has been raised with the notion that they are special, wonderful, important and that it's all about them, individually. Therefore, it follows that there is nothing better to take a picture of than their wonderful self. I also believe that it's a longing to be like the 'rich, famous and beautiful' people who are paraded across the magazines and screens, telling us how we should look, what we should wear, drive, eat and spend our time doing.
Going through my daughter's pictures one day I found a ton of pictures she and her good friend had taken together before we moved. At first, I thought it was nice and that they were cute, but the more I looked at them and thought about them, the more unhappy I became. Not that there was anything risque about them. It was just the dumb poses that they struck, the stuck out lips as if they were trying to make their mouths look more 'luscious' for lack of a better term. Too much sexualization if you really looked at it. I know these girls had no conscious intention to try to sexualize themselves, but because of the society they have been born into and have been drowning in ever since, they did it unconsciously. I have realized that I have a huge responsibility to try to steer them away from such behaviour and if they must have a camera, to teach them some photography skills to encourage them to take pictures of other things.
The end of the story: my daughter's camera was left laying around, of course, and the screen was broken. I'm not all that sad about it, either. I won't provide another so quickly and will do it with much contemplation and if I feel good about it.
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