Simo / The Object Itself

The camera that made photographs ordinary again.

Of everything folded into the rectangle, the lens changed daily life most quietly.

A camera used to be an occasion. You took it out for the occasion, and the occasion was defined partly by the fact that the camera had been brought. Film cost money, so photographs were rationed, and the rationing shaped what got photographed: weddings, holidays, the front of a new house. The phone dissolved that arithmetic. When the camera is always present and each frame costs nothing, the subjects change completely. People now photograph a parking bay number, a wine label, a whiteboard, a rash, a receipt, a friend mid sentence looking terrible. The camera became a notepad, and a notepad is used differently from a ceremonial instrument.

That shift produced a genuinely new kind of record. Older family albums are formal because the technology made them formal. The images of the last stretch of years are casual, plentiful and mostly unsorted, which means they are richer and harder to use at the same time. A shoebox of two hundred prints can be looked through in an evening. A store of forty thousand images cannot be looked through at all, only searched, and searching requires knowing what you are after. Abundance solved scarcity and handed over a filing problem in exchange, which is a fair description of many modern trades.

There is also a change in what a photograph is for. A picture of a car park level is not a memento. It is a message to yourself, twenty minutes into the future, and it will be deleted or ignored. Alongside these sit the images that will matter for fifty years, undifferentiated, in the same list. Most people never separate the two, and the mixing is not laziness so much as the absence of any moment where separation is required. The camera arrived without a cupboard, and we have not built one.