CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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The Long, Agonizing Process of Taking Group Photos In the Year 2012

Saturday, August 27, 2011

this entry brought to you by stereolab, "ticker-tape of the unconscious"


Michelle and I were invited out to a birthday party for a friend of ours. We sat next to him at the table, and it just so happened that the rest of the people sitting at the table were all women-- the table next to us was where most of the other guys were, and I sat there at this table to be near him, as I wasn't that familiar with the rest of his friends, whereas everyone else knew one another.

About halfway through the night the cameras came out, and, seeing as how I was surrounded by women, I thought, oh lord, here we go.

It struck me how obnoxious modern technology has made group photo taking. Everyone has a cell phone, and everyone has a camera in their cell phone, but, also, most people have stand-alone cameras, so the fact that picture taking was going to happen was an inevitability, but also didn't bug me on its own. It was how freaking long it took.

Someone got in front of the group with their camera and immediately several friends got into their pose face next to the birthday boy. A flash went off. But instead of taking another picture, the camera was then handed off to someone in the frame, who then looked at the photo, insisted that they looked ugly, then posed in the exact same pose and the photo was taken again. And then immediately afterwards the camera was then passed around again, the picture unapproved of once more, and the picture was taken. Over and over again. A single picture.

When a picture was finally taken that was approved by all parties-- when all parties doing the exact same pose did the exact same pose most to their liking-- people were switched out. The people who stayed from the previous picture did the exact same pose, the new people did the exact same pose, and the process was repeated.

But this is the part that amazed me. When the picture taker had taken pictures of everyone and was then done, the next person wanted pictures of everyone, who then went on to pose the exact same way, ask to see the pictures, insist the pictures get taken again, and the process was repeated-- for every single person who had a camera, which was essentially everybody.

I don't understand why everyone needed the exact same picture everyone else had already taken, only this time actually physically taken by them, even though there was no discernible difference in the result whether person A took it or person B. But what's worse is that all these people are all Facebook friends, and all these people immediately went home and uploaded all these pictures to their Facebooks and tagged everyone else in their versions of the pictures-- so only one person really needed to take these pictures and then share them with everyone else.

Now, obviously I don't mind people taking pictures of a night out with their friends so they can remember them later. What was infuriating was the process. Nobody was attempting to take natural, unposed pictures of one another, and nobody was attempting to do different poses in different pictures. But what was the most frustrating was that every single picture needed to be inspected by the entire group and reshot until somehow satisfactory. What would have been five minutes of photo taking in the days before digital cameras, where you took a picture and didn't know if you looked fat or not until months later when the person eventually got the film developed; nowadays when everyone must insist on being perfect in every photo, this took over forty minutes.
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with love from CRS @ 4:04 PM 

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