Project Description

INKTOBER 2024 Day #26: CAMERA.

“I think there are a lot of pictures of me from my youth making this and other similar faces. I don’t know what inspired that reaction every time a camera came out and was pointed at me. There was probably some discomfort with who I was and how I looked, so I would attempt to distract from that either by ‘ruining’ the picture on purpose or by trying to be ‘funny’. Maybe that’s overthinking things. Having observed my own children as well as my nephews and younger cousins and stuff, it seems to be a pretty universal kid phenomenon. Perhaps it’s a way to exert some form of power or control at an age where you tend to have none. Kind of ‘I can’t stop you from taking a picture, but I can control what the picture looks like whether you like it or not’. I suppose I could ask one of the young people in my life the next time a camera comes out (which is now a phone, of course) why they are making the face they are making, but given I don’t even know why I used to do it, I’ll probably get an ‘I don’t know’ or a blank stare.
On a side note, I sometimes wonder about which old technologies I grew up with that younger generations have no clue about. My kids have grown up with ‘cameras’ being a phone. A lot of the iconography for the functions of modern technology are representations of their older analog versions. Do kids even realize that the photo app icon is a silhouette of an actual camera? Or the phone app looks like an old corded phone? How many know what the standard ‘save’ icon actually looks like? Having grown up with all those discreet appliances and bits of technology, I appreciate the convenience of having an all-in-one device like a smart phone, and I wonder if I would had I not had that exposure.”

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