When I was your age, we didn't have any ding-dang digital cameras!

Above is one of the few photos of me from high school, playing bass in a talent show. You'll notice that it's a crop of a scanned film print of a lousy, dark, out of focus picture. Back then, you had 24 or 36 shots per roll of film, and you didn't know how they came out until perhaps weeks later (after finishing the roll and getting around to having it developed and printed). Sometimes you'd pick up the prints from the drug store and find half of them blank, or out of focus, or otherwise useless, because of camera malfunction or user error. Oh well – so much for those memories!

And of the small number of good photos, you generally didn't have more than two copies in 4x6 inch size. Although it was possible to enlarge and make as many copies as you wanted, most people didn't go through the trouble. They kept the 4x6 photos in a keepsake book. (I always kept the negatives, just in case I wanted to make more copies, but I bet it was common to throw them away)

Most of my classmates didn't own or use cameras; or if they did, the cameras were the disposable cardboard type. I was a weird one, using my grandfather's 20 year old Pentax K-1000. I'd have to go digging in my basement to find photos from those days, but I recall mostly photographing leaves, nature, landscapes, sometimes family. I don't think I ever brought the camera to school.

It's striking to think about how differently today's generation interacts with photography. When I see young people in public, they're often almost continuously photographing themselves – ephemeral snapshots fired off to friends, or else they're posing provocatively at every opportunity. Girls seem much more affected/addicted than boys, but all of them live in a world saturated with cameras. They're all self-consciously aware of the camera, and by extension, their appearance in photos. I assume that any young person who is mildly attractive will be so keenly aware of their beauty at an early age, and they will be compelled by the pervasive photographic culture of their peers to amplify it – to become more self-absorbed. They know exactly which camera angles and lighting will hide their flaws and enhance their beauty. And if those camera tricks don't work, they can press a button to enable a "beauty filter" that distorts the face into some normalized caricature of the original subject. Such photos are obviously false, but many young people seem unable to discern real from fake; or if they can discern, they clearly prefer the fake images.

Other people have pointed out that the invention of the front-facing camera on phones was an inflection point in our culture's narcissism epidemic. But since it was a development over a decade, we seem to have become acclimated to what is actually a radical change.

It's not healthy to record ourselves and each other constantly – particularly when the intention is to put our curated images of ourselves on public display. As someone who used to be heavily invested in the photographic medium – especially documentary photography – I have often thought about how the camera changes the subject and the photographer. In the past, I felt it was very important to capture slices of life, as a record for posterity. I tried to be careful not to conflate my images with "myself". The tools and photographic medium today – instagram, snapchat, tik tok – have refined a certain mode of self-absorbed interaction. I could photograph a boulder near my house and put it on instagram, but it feels terribly antiquated in a medium full of people performing their lives for the camera. The medium rewards them with likes, followers, attention. So they are drawn further in to a narcissistic, parasitic culture.

One hundred fifty years ago, the camera was a novel, amazing device. I can't imagine the huge cultural change from having zero means of capturing an image (other than drawing or painting a scene) to being able preserve a visually accurate slice of time. As camera technology improved, photos became more pervasive, but as I said earlier – even 20 years ago, most people did not own cameras or rarely used them. Because of the relative inconvenience and crudeness of the technology, there was still an innocence to the medium. Now that the technology has become so easy, fool-proof, and visually accurate, the meaning of the medium has changed. Somewhere along the line, photography has lost its innocence. We should be more vigilant about our involvement in the medium, since the medium has become about something else -- something other than capturing special personal or societal moments. It is now ensnared by algorithmic overlords, capitalizing on our viewing attention. It is distorted by hyper-realistic AI fakery, meant to absorb our attention and manipulate our perceptions of the real world.