"
One of the most reliable instincts of modern people,
at times of surpassing transcendence—witnessing the first kiss at a
wedding, watching our children's first steps, encountering a family of
cheetahs gnawing on a freshly killed gazelle—is to grab a camera. At
other places and times people might have written a poem, sung a song,
or carved a totem pole. But we, captive to the notion that the only
lasting reality is virtual, illuminate our transcendent moments with
flashbulbs.
The digital age, where film is effectively free, is
an era of even more promiscuous photography. By next year, the Gartner
Group predicts, 80 percent of cell phones sold in the United States
will include a camera. Users of camera phones don't need to wait for
carefully chosen moments. Instead they collect what the rapidly growing
photo website Flickr calls a photostream—a river of images both
momentous and mundane.
Many centuries after the shift from oral to written
culture, we are now well along in the transition to visual
culture—where the predominant mode of communication is images rather
than words. Just as the shift to writing required the skills we call
literacy, so visual culture requires its own skills—for lack of a
better word, visualcy."
Continue reading visualcy
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