Posted on 10/05/2015 7:44:10 AM PDT by Kaslin
Massachusetts native Paul Theroux has roamed the world for decades, visiting countless countries and drawing on his experiences in dozens of published novels, short stories, and volumes of travel writing. He has been everywhere, or as close to everywhere as one man can manage in a peripatetic career. What Theroux doesn't know about how to travel probably isn't worth knowing.
Here's one lesson he has gleaned from a lifetime of roving: The best traveling is done without a camera.
Theroux never takes photographs, he told the Wall Street Journal in a weekend interview, "because people who take pictures lose their capacity for close observation." To a generation of digital natives accustomed to capturing every detail of their lives with the cellphone they are never without, that might sound like the ultimate heresy. But Theroux is adamant: "Without a camera, you study a thing more carefully and remember it better. Taking a picture is a way of forgetting."
Theroux isn't the only savvy traveler who feels that way. The Telegraph's travel columnist Nick Trend journeyed for years without a camera, and consequently has few photographs of the places he has seen. But he's never felt he was missing much. "My theory," he wrote in 2011, "is that we remember things better if we haven't interrupted or compromised the experience by taking a photograph of it."
Harking back to a 1990 safari in Kenya and Tanzania, Trend still had vivid memories of marveling as "three lionesses padded past in the cold half-light just before dawn." More than two decades later, he could still "picture the dew on the long grasses" and "visualize the flicking tail of the last lioness." And he remembered something else: "the incessant clicks and motorized whirrs as the other tourists desperately tried to capture the moment for posterity."
Taking a picture is not the same thing as experiencing a moment. It is one thing to see a famous person or view a great work with your own eyes. It is something different — something less meaningful, less rich — to see that person through a smartphone lens, or to regard that masterpiece through the viewfinder of a video camera.
During Pope Francis's American sojourn last month, he was greeted everywhere by immense throngs of admirers and worshipers, many straining to catch a glimpse of the pontiff as his motorcade moved past. Tens of thousands of those onlookers, rewarded with the glimpse they had waited for, "watched" every second of it through their cellphone. Did they get more out of the occasion than those who focused wholly on the moment, eyes and ears and mind absorbing every detail, undistracted by thoughts of operating a camera or getting a good picture?
I think they got less, even if they did end up capturing the moment in pixels. Pixels aren't neurons, and only neurons can form and store memories. Having thousands of images on your cellphone doesn't mean you're remembering more. In fact it might mean just the opposite — that taking pictures to record things is tantamount to "outsourcing our memories," in the vaguely chilling phrase of Linda A. Henkel, a psychology professor at Fairfield University who studies memory distortion. By relying so compulsively on cameras to "get" the images we're seeing, Henkel argues, we're inevitably "taking away from the kind of mental cognitive processing that might help us actually remember [them] on our own."
She devised an ingenious experiment to test the hypothesis that photographing more means remembering less. She took participants on a tour of an art museum, instructing them to observe and remember some objects, and to photograph others. The results, as she wrote in a paper published in Psychological Science, showed a distinct "photo-taking-impairment effect." One day after the museum tour, the students remembered significantly fewervisual details about the objects they had photographed. "The act of photographing the object appears to enable people to dismiss the object from memory" because, consciously or not, they relied on the camera to remember for them.
Some people exult in the proliferation of recording devices because it reduced the need to actively commit knowledge to memory. "I've almost given up making an effort to remember anything, because I can instantly retrieve the information online," Clive Thompson, a columnist at Wired, has written. "And frankly, I kind of like it."
Well, I kind of don't like it. And when it comes to cameras, I'm with Theroux. It's not that I underestimate the value and power of photography, or that I don't have pictures that I cherish.
But if I want a digital image of the pope or lionesses or the Mona Lisa, I can get one in five seconds on Google Images. If I want a memory of personally seeing the pope or lionesses or the Mona Lisa — a long-term memory that deepens my experience and enlarges my mental world — the last thing I'll do is whip out a camera and start clicking. I'd rather focus on the moment, not on the shot.
I’m sort of with him....I am not a picture taker. But I don’t try to make a philosophy out of it. In fact, there are a few times over the years that I wish I had taken a picture. But only a few.
So true.
I only take photographs if other people are in them and would be interested in a memento of their trip. Otherwise, I experience the experience instead of cataloging it.
Years ago, in our Architecture office, we would say “That a picture is worth a thousand words and being there is worth a thousand pictures”
Not a bad point. But you also find a writer loses a memory as soon as he writes it down.
M4L photos
What I have always hated is traveling with people constantly taking pictures. Not only can you not share the moments with them, but they repeatedly interrupt the travel for the sake of the picture.
Now, with cell phones, this has spread to any event, however, trivial. An afternoon walk in the woods? An evening out for dinner? All must be “captured” for posterity—or at least Facebook.
What does M4L Photos mean? Memory for Losers?
Good thought. There is a difference between capturing a poignant moment vs. cataloging a trip. Most people lean towards the catalog, creating a deck of images that will likely spend eternity in the package (or these days nested in a folder with 10,000 other digital snapshots just like them).
The author touched on one other thing when he said, "And he remembered something else: "the incessant clicks and motorized whirrs as the other tourists desperately tried to capture the moment for posterity.""
I was fortunate enough to grow up in a time when we would vacation to places where we were often the only visitors. I hate crowds and avoid them whenever possible. I can't imagine the circumstances where I could be in the midst of the herd and capture a moment worth having or remembering.
Perhaps Øbongo's execution would be an exception ;')
Hey. I like this. Would never have to look at a bragabond’s trophies...
I need to see pictures to prove he travels. He could be making up all his travel stories from his couch.
Mark for Later = a reminder for my memory (not a loser) I hope.
Love and Peace
I have seen a few things like the waves of a huge storm breaking in the hangar deck of the USS Saratoga and spray from the waves coming across the flight deck that I can still remember clearly, there is no way to capture that on film to equal the memory. Riding out a storm big enough to make that monster roll eleven degrees to one side and then the other made me very, very happy that I was not on a destroyer or something even smaller. It has to be lived to understand it. It cannot be put into words even and only vaguely captured on film. A ship like that rides though most “severe” storms the way a canoe cuts through a tiny ripple on a millpond. In twenty foot waves you could hold a square dance on deck.
I do a good deal of photography and have loved overseas for almost 30 yrs. retiring almost 5 yrs. ago. I know the advantage of both points of view. Sometimes I want to just enjoy being in a place without the hassle of equipment and a “need” to document anything. Other times, I’m very glad I took photos.
Problem is, at some point in life, you do start to forget. I’m going through old slides my dad took starting back in the mid 1950’s. Yes, there’s a lot of throw aways in there, and yes, the quality of some of those old camera was not the greatest. But... now with my dad and my sister both gone, and only mom and I left, these photos are family treasures for my own kids and my grandkids. I’m in the process of digitizing the keepers - and there are some great ones!
While living in Adana, Turkey, we took a trip to a more easter area. Very primitive. We went to an apple orchard run by one family. An elderly man came out carrying a few small apples in his hands. I forever regret not having a camera with me. My friend who was with me did but he didn’t get the shot I would have loved to have had. A wide angle close up of the man’s hands holding the apples where the depth of field falls off quickly. His hands were almost black and extremely weathered from working the soil and who knows what else and there were deep cracks in many of his fingers and thumbs. It was humbling and heart wrenching to see his poverty and hard life, yet here he was offering us his best. So, yes, both ideas have relevance and if you let it, having a camera can change how you experience an event. But if I had to pick, I’d take my camera. You can always leave it in the car or hotel room but you can’t drive or fly back 2,000+ miles, or go back 20 yrs. to get it if you didn’t pack it to begin with. And with today’s phones, well, there’s no excuse. Let the snobs think what they want to.
***** “That a picture is worth a thousand words and being there is worth a thousand pictures” *****
Then there are some pictures worth a thousand pictures
m4l
Moments for Lovers................ /s
I don’t take photographs to augment my memories; I do it to share the observations with others who cannot be there: It’s documentation. I also do repeat photographs over time to demonstrate change in nature. I can remember that a tree was there before, but the rate of growth the photos reveal is astonishing to me.
I just scanned some 2,750 prints. The eighteen hours of microcassettes that followed will be followed by 27 of VHS cassettes. I'm negotiating capturing some 3/4" cassettes this morning. Then there are the slides. I think I'll send those out, as cleaning them will be beyond me. Then there is sending out the files for prints, framing...
It's taking months to get done, but my study room is gaining more room for books!!!
It doesn't mean that some things are better experienced sans camera. . .but I think its not an either/or decision.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.