Published on 12, July, 2020
I notice that so many people photograph everything and catalogue thier lives and curate them via this medium. I don't take photographs even when I have a camera and I've not had one for over a decade and really dislike photo's of myself. Other people find my lack of photos strange, my lack of curation and cataloguing strange, whre as I find their need to do this strange. One of ther reasons I don't take photo's is I find it stops me being in the moment, it's an interuption to an experience I'll never have fully again, I'll have a visual reminder of an experience not fully experienced and lived. To me it seems to be living vicariously through images whilst being unmindful of the time and place and the feeling evoked.
I also wondered how people would cope if we had a big tech outage and photographing everything was no longer an option because we'd have to go back to 35ml film camera's and either have our own dark rooms to process them or send them off to be comercially processed?
When I got diagnosed recently, it became obvious that my dad would have also been autistic. His lifetime special interest was photography and he was a professional photographer - not of people but for a technology research firm. His interest did ignite it in me but not to the full special interest extent.
I do take a lot of pictures but I also don't want to do not live in the moment, like you say. So, I compromise a bit and I have a events where I have not taken a single photo.