Too many photos, not enough memories
My kids love getting their hands on my phone, or any other adult’s for that matter. I suppose the closest equivalent when I was young (not all that long ago) was being allowed to hold a real camera. Back then, cameras felt like exotic adult tools rather than extensions of our hands.
My father always had a 35 mm camera around on holidays and family trips, a metallic Pentax with a strap that smelled faintly of leather. Because of that, we have some good photographs from when we were children, but they are few and far between. The colours have softened, the paper has curled, and the moments they captured now seem even further away. Each photograph feels deliberate. Someone had to stop, compose, and care enough to use one of those precious exposures, and remembering where they were taken is half the fun.
The weight of early frames
My sister got her first camera on her tenth birthday, I think during a trip to Paris. It was one of those small 110 film models that clicked loudly and made you feel like a professional. She took photos of the Eiffel Tower, pigeons, and whatever caught her eye. I got my own camera a few years later, graduating to an APS model that felt impossibly modern. You could switch between standard, wide, and panoramic, and each roll came with the same nervous arithmetic: twenty-four or thirty-six frames, a hundred or four hundred ISO, and the eternal question of whether the photos would actually turn out. That sense of risk was half the pleasure.
Then came the digital years. The first cameras felt miraculous and maddening at the same time. Two megapixels of possibility, followed by the headache of transferring them to a computer and watching the slow progress bar inch forward. Still, it was freedom. You could take as many photos as you liked and delete the bad ones without guilt. And then smartphones arrived and even that small act of choosing disappeared.
Too many pictures, too little meaning
Around fifteen years ago I decided to digitise and geotag all of my old film photographs to add them to my rapidly increasing digital collection. It took weeks of scanning and labelling, but it felt worthwhile. It was a way to keep hold of a past that was already beginning to fade around the edges. When I look at those images now, the ones from my father’s camera and my own early experiments, they feel heavier somehow. They carry the weight of being one of only a few.
We've lived in Switzerland for six years now, and when I look at my iCloud library, I can see that more than half the photographs I have ever taken were shot during this period. That alone says something about how completely image-making has woven itself into everyday life. I’m as guilty as anyone here. The quality is astonishing. Every image is geotagged, time-stamped, and backed up in the cloud, yet the more I have, the less they seem to matter. There are countless versions of the same sunset, the same birthday cake, children doing crafts, opening presents, the same familiar walk to school. What was once an act of observation has quietly become an act of reflex, and I find myself wondering what this constant experience of being photographed by grown-ups is doing to our children.
That feeling is not limited to photography. It echoes something I have found myself circling back to in other areas of life too, the quiet challenge of staying attentive and present in an increasingly noisy world. I explored that idea more directly in On staying upright in a noisy world, where the real issue is not volume or speed, but what they quietly do to our attention.
It's no surprise that there is a growing movement among younger generations to rediscover analogue photography and filmmaking. For them, film represents a kind of honesty that has been lost. They are trading instant gratification for patience, precision, and sometimes imperfection. It is not about nostalgia. It is about meaning. When you load a roll of film, you have to decide what deserves a frame. You have to slow down long enough to notice what you are looking at.
That instinct, the pull back towards slowness and intention, feels connected to a wider generational shift I have been thinking about for a while. I came at it from a different angle in Gen X to GenAI: From analogue to AI where the focus is less on the technology itself and more on what we gain and lose as tools become frictionless.
The return of intention
Perhaps that is what we have misplaced in the age of infinite memory. Not beauty or technology, but attention. A photograph used to mark something that had weight. Now it risks becoming proof that we were simply there. And with the arrival of generative AI image tools, I suspect that the craving for real, analogue-taken imagery will only increase.
The pictures are clearer than ever. The memories aren't.