Yesterday, I read that there are more than 80,000,000 photos uploaded to Instagram every day. As I thought about the enormity of that number, I remembered something a wise woman once told me.
About twenty years ago I went swimming with dolphins. Not in a theme park where they are in captivity, but out in the ocean, where they live. I overcame my anxiety about boarding a plane that only holds about 10 people and lands on the water because I was hoping this experience would outweigh any temporary discomfort. After boarding in Miami, that plane flew me to the small island of Bimini and one of the most significant events of my life.
For six days straight, we went out far on a boat, and waited for the dolphins. Out of nowhere, they would appear, sometimes two, sometimes five or six…circling the boat, waiting patiently for us to get in the water. We put on fins and would climb down the ladder as they graciously let us enter their world for a while. In the wild, you must respect them and are not allowed to touch them. But in their curiosity, they would circle us and play with each other, and when seemingly bored with us, some unspoken signal between them would occur and off they went.
Or so we thought. As we headed back to shore, they would emerge and swim alongside the boat in unison in a beautiful up and down motion with the waves. Sometimes they would surge ahead and leap out of the water, creating an image like those we had all seen in a PBS nature documentary.
Everyone on board would rush to find their camera but for some reason, the dolphins would go underwater just as we pressed the shutter. It was as if they knew. On the second day, our guide – a woman who had spent years taking people just like me out on this boat – said, “Stop trying to take pictures and just watch. You’re missing them.”
She was right. We put away the cameras and just watched. And she watched with us, even though she had experienced this hundreds of times.
I got home from that trip and looked at my pictures; I didn’t capture one photo of the dolphins. But the image of them swimming alongside us is forever embedded in my memory.
So, what has made us want to photograph every moment of every day and post it for the world to see? Is it just because everyone else is doing it? I wonder…
In our rush to capture images, are we losing memories?