Two Faced

We were supposed to bring in a photo from our childhood last week, and to my knowledge at the time I was under the impression that it would end with a "who was the cutest baby" contest but instead we were forced to find the deeper meaning that each photo represented in our lives. Which had me thinking, photos are a false construct of our history. 

There is a Native American legend that if you have your picture taken then the camera manages to steal a part of your soul with each photo. Imagine this, I was going through my camera roll and came across an old friend group photo from sophomore year. I stopped and laughed at how young and energetic me and my friends all were at the time and sat back, high off of nostalgia; but what the photo failed to capture were the emotional scars we carried at the time, behind our pearlescent smiles was a group of children, terrified that our friendship wouldn't last the winter-it didn't- behind the interwoven hands and the collective arms behind waist gestures laid the tension between the majority of us that to this day was never put to rest. After taking a moment to look deeper into the photo I realized the baggage we were all carrying into the photo was overlooked with a flashy filter and a witty caption; the souls of our past selves forever frozen in one painful moment in time, but our friends, family... followers, would have never guessed the emotional trauma each individual was going though at them time.

I mean why would they? "photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it" It was just one more photo in the sea of other users in the web, what does it matter how we were all feeling at the time as long as it got a high like to comment ratio? Photos were meant to capture moments in history for future reference, whether that be American history or personal life, they fail at the one task they were created for. A student in class brought up a photo he saw where a Dictator was holding hands with a handful of children, to the casual viewer it appeared to be a rather wholesome picture; leaving them unaware of the atrocities the man or woman had ordered prior to the photo shoot. All this talk about liquid camera lenses with live photos, but these pictures couldn't be deader. As fake and lifelike as the pixels they are projected on to.