It's only beautiful if you can get a picture of it (part rant, part aethetic quandry)

I've been neglecting to comment in this thread because I was looking for a painting I once saw of a guy taking a picture of scenery, only the camera was acting as a vacuum sucking up all of the beauty and leaving a blank page behind. I couldn't find it. Anyway, cameras cheapen beauty and experience for me, they kind of kill the rawness and profundity of the situation. In my age group the first thing many people do when they see something beautiful is take out a camera, and for the majority of them the reason isn't to preserve the beauty: it's to post it on facebook, so you can prove that you're "living your life to the fullest" to everyone you knew in highschool. Kill me.

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Originally Posted by Charles Darnay

What is the value though? What is the difference between a picture you take of - say - Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and one found on Google images (except that the latter is probably better quality?) What is the mystique that personal pictures have that add to the experience of seeing something beautiful?

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There's a blogger I like (the only blogger I like) who wrote something exactly like this very recently. Maddox, mostly ranting about iPads, but touching on this subject (warning: he's pretty rude).

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Originally Posted by Maddox

Want to take a picture? Cool, use a camera. Or your phone. Or here's a novel idea: don't. Nobody needs to see more of whatever temporal bull**** you think qualifies as being a subject of photographic expression.

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Originally Posted by Maddox

I used to take pictures of paintings in museums, until one day I took this picture of Van Gogh's self-portrait in Paris, and was filled with existential dread; in fact, it's the very picture you see on this page. While I was waiting for the padhole to finish taking his ****ty photos, I sat there staring at this picture on my camera, trying to see what made it "mine." It looked like every other picture of Van Gogh's self-portrait I'd ever seen.

I kept staring at "my" picture, looking for some glimmer of justification for its existence, I thought that maybe I could show this to my friends as proof that I'd seen the portrait with my own eyes. But I'm not in this picture, so there's no proof I was ever there. Even if I was in the picture, it could have been photoshopped. And why would I need to prove it to anyone anyway?

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Maddox is sound.

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In my age group the first thing many people do when they see something beautiful is take out a camera, and for the majority of them the reason isn't to preserve the beauty: it's to post it on facebook, so you can prove that you're "living your life to the fullest" to everyone you knew in highschool. Kill me.

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Yes, facebook has long warn it's welcome out, just an awful site.

Social Media is a paradox.There's not a social thing about trying to impress everyone you used to half know one time on a screen by creating a personal page showing how great you are. We all know it's bs.

Facebook further materializes people, makes dating kind of like online shopping.

It's also incredibly fake. We aren't the plastic generation, we're generation photoshop.

I could rant forever about how much I hate facebook but I'll let it go, don't want to derail topic.

Awesome stuff, Juniper. That is pretty much what I was getting at.

I like photographing things that would typically be considered ugly, but because of the lighting, angles and later manipulations I make on the computer it comes to be beautiful.

Its fine to criticize superfluous amateur photography, but we shouldn't therefore write off an entire artistic medium, one which has produced countless aesthetically significant works of art.

Plus, if it wasn't for the proliferation of cameras and their increased usage we wouldn't have been given such gems as this:

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/4958986.bin