Paparazzi

I was having a conversation last night with a friend of mine who also works with students in Florence.  And we were talking about what it is like to travel with students on academic field trips organized by the school.

We agreed that one thing that makes us crazy is the absolute obsession with taking photos of every single thing and how photographing takes precedence over everything, including listening to the guide or trying to understand what the things in all the photographs actually are.  It's like a frenzy and I'm not exaggerating at all when I say that.  I have watched students run a little bit ahead, stop at every corner we passed and hurriedly snap four pictures, one in each direction.  And then run ahead to the next corner and do the same thing.  And with such urgency, you would not believe it, as if their very lives depended totally and completely on getting a picture of each and every street in Siena or Assisi or Rome or whatever city we were in.  It's comical, really, and a little sad.

The sad thing is that anyone in the world can view the events of our lives through our posts on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram—but I have to ask if we are missing out on something of the moment in our frenzy to share every last moment of our lives.  People always say things like "oh, it was so beautiful, a picture doesn't even capture it,"--so what are we missing out on when we see our own travels (or even our everyday lives!) primarily through the lens of a camera or an iphone?  Were we actually there?  Or are we seeing our own lives from the outside?

One of my favorite "fun facts" to share with people is the etymology of the word "paparazzi."  The word comes from Federico Fellini's masterpiece, La dolce vita, which, incidentally, is one of my favorite Italian films ever and a film that everyone should see at least twice.  At any rate, in this film, Paparazzo is the last name of a photographer who is friends with Marcello Mastroianni's character and has a habit for being in the right place at the right time, particularly at sensitive moments in people's lives as the story unfolds.

Without going into a full analysis of the film, suffice it to say that a recurring motif is depicting the way that our constant obsession with media, photography and documenting things  disrupts sensitive and important moments in our lives and even in our society.  Although Fellini claimed that he was not aiming for satire, but rather just depicting reality, there is surely a satirical underpinning at work here.  Keep in mind that this film came out in the year 1960.

Flash forward to the year 2013, over half a century later, and I would love to know what Fellini would have to say about the current state of things. It would look a little bit different, I think because it is not longer just the media with bulky cameras and elaborate set ups, it's each of us, looking at the events of our own lives through a screen.

To an extent, we have all become the paparazzi in our own lives.

And I'm not trying to sound preach-y here.  I recognize my own culpability in all this and that I am not somehow immune from the addiction to over-sharing.  Although I made fun of Instagram for a long time, I have recently become obsessed with it myself, a self-professed hypocrite as sure as I stand!

In fact, I'm almost certain that, if such studies don't exist already (and if they do, please send them my way!), in the next few years, we will see research about how all this snapping and sharing is changing our brains.  I'm not a psychologist by any means, but I'm certain that sharing prompts some kind of chemical release in our brains that makes it addicting.

Am I advocating that we tear ourselves away from all technology, photography and social media?  Well, no, not exactly.  Technology is a tool which, like a knife that could be used to kill a man or to help us share our bread (not my words, but a metaphor that I love!).  We can choose to use it to destroy ourselves or to create a better world.  Pictures can be powerful and the potential for the good that can come from sharing could be exponential. When we share photos from our travels, the world becomes that much smaller, which is a powerful thing and one that could be a tremendous force for good. To give an example, I follow a handful of photo-journalists on Instagram and have been seeing images from Egypt and Afghanistan that help me to put human faces to places I've never been and struggles I can't truly fathom.

What I'm really getting at is awareness.  I'm not living in a fantasy world and I'm not telling anyone to pull a Henry David Thoreau and abandon all connections to civilization to live secluded in the woods. But I am saying that when you see something beautiful or incredible, don't immediately reach for your phone, but rather take a minute to appreciate the moment you are living in.  If you absolutely must snap the picture, limit yourself and take your photos consciously, not mindlessly.  Take one or two and then put the phone or the camera away. (In my experience, I get better photos this way, anyway!)  Recognize that, in reality, in a year, you won't remember how many likes that picture got on Facebook and probably won't even be able to find it, searching through the thousands of things that you have posted. (It's true!!)

Above all, I hope that we can realize that the value of the moments in your life is not measured by how well we documented them or how many pictures we took or how many people left comments on our Facebook page.  A better metric is how we connected with other people, what we learned and how we use that knowledge to better ourselves and the world.  And those, my friends, are things really can't be captured in a photograph.


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PS:

For anyone interested, I'm inserting a link to one of the most memorable scenes from La dolce vita.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find one with English subtitles, but I think the images are powerful enough to speak for themselves.

Also, if you click here, you can see a short, but brilliant video that pretty much sums up everything I just wrote.  It was viral a few weeks ago, so you might have already seen it, but if you haven't watched it, you absolutely should!!