Rise of the Happy Snappers

Paparazzi

For Americans living in the 1970s, it was this photo, a nine-year old Vietnamese girl running with third degree Napalm burns. This photograph embodied the suffering, the hurt, and the complete barbarism that the Vietnam War came to stand for, shocking the American public and along with other images, a major factor in the war’s growing unpopularity and opposition. The rarity of this image showing the atrocities of war completely changed the relationship between photography and the media, something that seems obvious and normal in today’s snap-happy society.

How many times on a night out have you stood clutching a drink and smiling through gritted teeth as your drunken friend merrily snaps away, recording the moment for prosperity (and Facebook), knowing that she’ll have hundreds of practically identical shots when the night is over? Do you bug your friend the next day, pestering her to ‘put the photos up from last night’, tagging and de-tagging and commenting and liking, revelling in your own vanity? We all do it, we all fall victim to the obsession with documenting our every move, the lure of being a pseudo celebrity with our own paparazzi, and we all secretly hate ourselves for it.

With the increasing quality of cameras on phones, the same phenomenon is often seen on the news or TV programmes, where when a disaster occurs such as 9/11, they are so inundated with viewer pictures and videos that they need not provide their own coverage at all. While this is sometimes a useful thing as it can help piece together events, what is disturbing is to think that in the event of a major disaster, with people screaming, running, possibly dying, a lot of people’s first reaction is to whip out their mobile phone and record the macabre events.

The media is often seen as encouraging this dangerous hobby, as they broadcast and sometimes pay for the images, an example being the July 7th London Tube bombings, when within a few hours, photos taken on the camera phones of survivors were being shown around the world. It has to be asked whether these photos make any real difference to investigations or whether they are simply feeding the public’s morbid curiosity.

Just under two thirds of UK households have a digital camera, and this does not take into account the numerous cameras on mobile phones, hand-held gaming devices, webcams etc. Sales of digital SLR cameras have beaten the odds and have increased during the recession, and can often be seen in the hands of bum-bag-clad tourists all over the world, taking picture after picture that will often languish on a computer hard drive somewhere, never to be seen again.

According to the late Susan Sontag, American novelist and political activist, photography is a way of ‘aestheticising the whole world,’ of finding the beauty and wonder or horror of something and presenting it in a way that has a meaning. In our overloaded, over visual world, it is not quality but quantity that takes precedence, whether it be the number of comments you get on a Facebook picture or the correlation between number of photos you’ve been tagged in and ‘popularity.’ So next time you’re out on the town, leave the camera at home.

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