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I’ve said in the past how memory is everything for a writer. More importantly, however, it’s precisely the memorable experience that is useful for authors. In other words, experiencing something that affects you helps create an image of the experience. This mental image, though accessible only by and through your mind, is very vivid and powerful in terms of affect. Perhaps it is its very nature – abstract, rare, living its ghostly existence only in your consciousness – that gives it its power. Compare that with the modern habit of taking too many photos without the experiences associated with them.

It’s insidious.

I doubt – though nowadays, you never know – you took actual photos during your first date with your loved one. Which one do you remember the best, particularly in terms of affect? The first date from ten years ago with zero photos or a vacation four years ago with hundreds of actual photos (and plenty more selfies)?

Taking too many photos without the experiences the photos refer to renders them both meaningless. Let’s see why, and it’s particularly from an author’s standpoint I’m examining this. It all began… with a dream.

Who Needs too many Photos when You Have Memory?

I had a dream last night. It was a dream of the apartment my grandparents used to live long, long time ago, in the end of 1980s. I have happy childhood memories from that place – I was a small child when they lived there. For some reason there are zero (0) photos from that apartment. Perhaps nothing ever happened there, no party or anything of the sort, therefore there was no reason to drag the one and only (film) camera to take any pictures. Nonetheless, I remember that place so vividly that it’s scary.

Entering the apartment, there was a square hallway with dark spotted marble flooring. My grandparents had a tall mirror there, encased in some black wooden frame with red velvet padding on each side, encircling coat hooks. By the side of the mirror there was a small round table with a black rotary-dial phone. Walking ahead was another small square room that served as my grandma’s bedroom. There was access to a small balcony, with a view to an inner garden. I remember every other detail of that apartment – my grandpa’s room, the windowless kitchen with the ochre-colored walls, the small bathroom with the hospital-green tiles, everything…

Photos or Experiences?

After I woke up, with the images of the apartment still echoing in my mind, I wondered about the fact of not having any photos from that place. My instinctive thought was that if I had any pictures, I would remember even more of my childhood memories there. And then suddenly, I realized something.

What if not having any photos is precisely what “forces” me to remember those childhood memories? Would having more actual pictures help or rather interfere with the actual process of reminiscent itself, particularly from an affective-experience standpoint?

Would having photos have made the experiences less memorable?

One thought led to another, and I began wondering about the impact of digital photography for affective experiencing. Think about it. We live in the time where the members of a typical 4-person family have at least 4 cameras (their cell phones) at their disposal, at all times. I don’t even want to imagine how many (mostly meaningless) photos they take every single day.

Too many photos of your cat, too many photos of your meal. Ultimately, too many photos of your life, which precludes the possibility of actually experiencing this life. Taking too many pictures simply dilutes your experiencing, it interferes with your memory, pushing it (and you with it) to mediocrity and watered-down emotions.

The Temporal Paradox of Taking too many Photos without Experiences

Remember the last time you went to a music concert (assuming it was within the past few years). Do you recall the sea of cell screens all around you, recording the concert? Heck, you might have done it yourself. Taking one or two photos, I understand. But why spending time recording a video of the whole thing, instead of actually experiencing it? Especially when you see dozens, hundreds of others doing the exact same thing! Most of these videos will end up on YouTube, you’ll find them. If this is not mental numbness, I don’t know what it is.

We live in the times when people are preoccupied with the present not as such, but as a reconstructed past which will be recalled at some undefined future time. In other words, people have developed a quasi-obsessive need to store their present experience so that they can remember it (as past) in the future. The catch-22 of this, of course, is that their actions bring about the very opposite effect.

As they are preoccupied with storing the present instead of actually living it, they form no mental images of it. There is no memorable experience, because there is no experiencing. At this undefined future point, they’ll sit down and watch the pictures, but it will be a zombie experience; the affect will be absent. That is, if this undefined future point ever comes. How many times have you ever gone through the untold thousands of photos on your hard drive to find the video of a concert you went to 7 years ago?