There are no moving images of my childhood. No old reels of home movies, obsolete camcorder cassettes, VHS tapes or iPhone digital videos. Part of that is a function of my analog generation. But it’s also due to the apparent apathy of my parents – or perhaps they were just too busy, what with divorce, living in separate states and single motherhood in the mix. While we have boxes full of old Polaroid prints and photo albums bulging with blurry snapshots taken with wind-up, one-time-use Kodak cameras that we delivered to the drive-in Fotomat for our pictures to be developed overnight, my parents weren’t much into moviemaking.
All of those clichés about Dad pulling out the projector and showing home movies are lost on me. No one in my family owned a Super 8 film camera, or any other kind of camera, until VHS camcorders came around.
My kids, on the other hand, have pretty much every major moment and minor milestone documented via video, film and digital photos, preserved (presumably forever) on social media, and archived in the great cloud in cyberspace that grows exponentially larger with every nanosecond.
As a society we’re in a documentary-making mode in which our children are all stars of their own shows. It all has profound implications for the future of our families, the columnist in me claims. Or maybe it’s all just a bit of fun.
Critics, bloggers and academics warn us that being photographed and filmed so frequently induces self-awareness and thus self-evaluation and self-criticism. Seeing it all online makes it even worse.
A 2015 British study concluded that kids who spend more than three hours each school day on social media sites are more than twice as likely to suffer poor mental health. FOMO, or the fear of missing out on something important, leads to depression and anxiety in teen social media users, according to a study by the Australian Psychological Society.
I suffer from FOMO. Digital photography is my cure.
Just now, my wife texted me a video clip of our kids jumping at a trampoline center. Those daily updates make me feel a part of their weekday lives, while offering a few seconds of respite from a hard day working at my computer.
Despite the downside and risks of this brave new technology, the advent of mobile photography and social media has added to the beauty, creativity and aesthetic aspects of many of our lives, including mine. My wife, Elaina, is the family photographer and has been since we got our first smartphone. She was an early Instagram adopter and has mastered the photo aesthetics of that medium.
Her digital photography and social media posting are leading her on a creative journey that’s accelerated in recent months. She began shooting only on an iPhone, but now has digital, film and medium-format film cameras. She’s learning to develop and print her own film at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, and she’s reading the biographies of great photographers.
She has clients, including paying ones, who are ecstatic at the photos she takes of births, newborns and families. The future seems bright for her creative endeavors.
Our kids are taking it all in, this blossoming of a creative talent that’s happening in the midst of diapers being changed and mealtime being prepared. And the emerging artist just happens to be their mother.
Our two oldest (4 and almost 6) have followed her lead, or so it seems to me, diving deep into the creative arts with an enthusiasm and (dare I say it?) skill that surprises me.
So, sure: We should all get our faces out of our phones and enjoy the real world. At times, I urge my wife to put the cameras down. And by all means, we all should protect our kids from the dangers of social media and its attendant risks of self-absorption, bullying and unsavory influences. But my wife and many others are proof that even smartphone photography can become art, or at least strive to be.
I don’t have access to grainy, old films of myself as a kid, but my grown children and grandchildren will be able to look back at images of their mother, me and themselves as kids and at pictures of the family together.
They’ll likely still be able to find this column online, too. So in case they do: Hello, kids! How does life look in 2056? Give your mom a hug from me. I love you all, and I hope your well-documented future is as fun and creative as our present.
