The Joy in Not Taking the Photo
What's Missing from the Photos We Take
We do not have photographs of our most joyous experiences. And if we tried to photograph them, we would simultaneously and rather ironically prevent their occurrence. This is because the best moments originate in spontaneity.
When I looked at my 12-year-old daughter, earlier this year, she seemed, in that moment, inexplicably taller than the little human being I used to carry in a baby sling while preparing meals and taking care of household chores. So I figured I better take the opportunity, right then, to hold her like a baby before she got so big I might not have strength enough to do it again. She playfully indulged me, and we smiled, laughed and hugged. I didn't ask my son to grab my phone or snap a photo. Had I done that we would have started to pose or stepped outside of the full aliveness of the moment. (The same problem might well occur with talking to each other if we tried to record our most meaningful conversations.)
The problem with our photos is that they are usually mementos of premeditation and tend not to capture the authentic aliveness in organic occurrences of life. And maybe that is as it ought to be. Aliveness is an expression of oneness with the living world. Such a creative communion cannot, after all, be captured, contained, or possessed. Even our best art can only refer or point to life. Only we can genuinely exemplify it. That is to say, only we can be alive. And the joy we seek is there, and only there, in “being” fully alive.
The desire to capture or possess our most cherished experiences—to make “memories”—at the expense of fully in the present speaks to an ongoing conflict within us between “having and being,” as Erich Fromm has explained it in To Have or to Be (1976). The “having” way of life emphasizes acquisition and possession of things rather than authentic and sustained encounters or participation in life. Through this mode of unliving we identify with and define ourselves through our possessions: we are what we have or what we possess.
In an earlier work, Escape From Freedom (1941), Fromm explained why he thought living centered on possession was as commonplace as it was misguided .
“There is no genuine strength in possession as such, neither of material property nor of mental qualities like emotions or thoughts. There is also no strength in use and manipulation of objects; what we use is not ours simply because we use it. Ours is only that to which we are genuinely related by our creative activity, be it a person or an inanimate object. Only those qualities that result from our spontaneous activity give strength to the self and thereby form the basis of its integrity. The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness. Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves, and there is nothing that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours.”
The “being” approach to life, by contrast, is centers on mindful and reverent encounters with life and all that is intrinsically valuable—the ends rather than the means of life. In the being-mode we identify with what we are or exemplify rather than what we have or possess. Being, in this sense, is active, attentive, authentic participation in life. When one is in the being state of existence, “one neither ‘has’ anything nor ‘craves’ to ‘have’ something, but is joyous, employs one’s faculties productively, is ‘oned’ to the world,” as Fromm puts it in To Have or to Be. The being orientation is the flowering of our fullest self—our greatest human power, potency.
The being mode of existence is precisely what we experience when we find ourselves in beautiful, spontaneous communion with the world. When a beautiful creature unexpectedly lands on a leaf before our eyes and we pause in joyful appreciation; when our child makes a comment that bursts forward with special meaning given what we know of them; when an electrifying conversation unexpectedly erupts between two friends, lasting for an hour though it felt fleeting; when, as you are closing your window blinds at dusk, you pause in appreciation of a delightful cotton candy sky.
“Most of us can observe at least moments of our own spontaneity which are at the same time moments of genuine happiness,” wrote Fromm in In Escape From Freedom.
“Whether it be the fresh and spontaneous perception of a landscape, or the dawning of some truth as the result of our thinking, or a sensuous pleasure that is not stereotyped, or the welling up of love for another person—in these moments we all know what a spontaneous act is and may have some vision of what human life could be if these experiences were not such rare and uncultivated occurrences.”
You know the other examples. They stand out. So much, so, that we sometimes break with the moment and try to “capture” them. But in doing so we gain a possession—be it a memory, social media post, or tangible photograph—at the expense of (being present in) the experience.
More often than not, our photos are distractions and distortions. In many instances, the taking of photos is an interruption of our best moments. Craving eternity, we seek to hold onto or prolong these joyful moments. But these photographic interventions, ironically, insert time into timeless moments of joy. And such timeless moments are our only actual encounter with eternity.
At their worse, the photos we take are parodies or blatant falsifications of happiness that is actually absent. It is as if we are manufacturing propaganda to convince our future self that an illusory happiness. This is to say nothing of the fact that we rarely photograph our unhappiness.
A realization that is wise to recall when, after a perfectly reasonable break-up, a social media or photo app inundates us with an endless stream of photos “evidencing” just how happy we were with our ex.
The photographs we use to capture the present, and later to recall the past, fail on both accounts. The authentic present cannot be captured, it can only be experienced. And the photographs we usually take do not reflect the deepest joy life offers us. Better to develop a disciplined love of spontaneity that habitually inclines us be in the present and not to break with the moment for a photo op.
Admittedly, photos can remind us of treasured experiences. Our faulty memories frustrate us, and photos of past experiences not only remind us of the past but they also transport us, there, too. Thus it’s unlikely that we ever put our cameras away for good. But we should consider how much we lose in picking them up for “memory’s sake” when doing so comes at the expense of the experience itself; or when the memory’s we are “creating” are distortions if not blatant falsifications. Perhaps we would all do well to work at being better at being fully present and turning fleeting moments into eternal encounters with joy.
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