What if, I wondered, my son, then three years old, didn’t want his photo on Instagram with spaghetti and marinara cascading down his belly as he reclined in a high chair? Even if I asked my daughter, who was 8 at the time, if I could post her photo, did she really understand what “public” meant? Did she understand that the goofy image would be online essentially forever? When our children were younger, I worried about posting too many images of them on my social media. The lens of her camera phone knows more than we do as parents. Her camera roll is an hourly collection of silly dogs, friends in class and selfies at stoplights. The Snapchat messages from friends beg for an immediate response. When police asked him to provide an alibi, he wasn’t able to pinpoint exactly where he had been on the day of the murder.Įlla holds her alibi in her hand: her phone. One of her favorite podcasts, a true-crime investigation of a murder in 1999, tracked the life of a teenage boy who was a suspect in the crime. When I told Ella about my column idea for today, she provided another anecdote to illustrate how much our relationship with cameras has changed. Social media constantly deceives them about the allure of being impossibly thin, glossy and happy - giddy mannequins wrapped in luxury clothing. Would the occasion be more joyful, we parents ask as we watch from the outskirts, if they simply celebrated for the fun of it, rather than for the camera? With cameras so present at every occasion (and non-occasion), our sons and daughters preen and perform for the attention of the lens. With that said, omnipresent cameras create costs. But I can’t help but wonder how just a few images might teleport me back to those moments of school spirit and youthful pyromania. I still hold these happy pockets of memories, even without photos. The kinds of moments that Ella is photographing exhaustively these days are missing from my high school photo albums. If we were teens in 2022, my high school best friend Jeff and I would have made endless videos of our backyard fireworks stunts. ![]() I remember my buddy Aaron painting my chest blue before a football game. ![]() Even though I loved photography at the time, some of my best friends from high school in the 1990s exist almost completely in my memory. My wife and I are a little jealous of that. Along with so many others in her generation who stare back at the lens’ gaze, my daughter will not wonder what her life looked like. Which of the 3,587 photos of her with the dog should I choose? Which of the 7,962 photos of her at the barn should I choose?Ĭurating those photos - the daily chronicling of my daughter’s life - made me realize how thoroughly documented her life is. The size of our image archive became clear this fall when a rite of high school senior year - the senior yearbook ad - forced me to narrow my catalog of nine bazillion images down to a handful. I crouch low with my camera, my SD card reformatted, to ensure that not even one digital image gets mangled. We have been here, whether with a cellphone camera or a digital SLR, in response to nearly every modestly significant twitch in her life arc. Snapchats sent from the backseat of a friend’s car on the way to the homecoming dance. Selfies studded with the glint of middle-school braces. Yearbook portraits posed in school cafeterias converted for a day into photo studios. We are assembling the same visual timeline for her brother, born four years later. Since that moment, Ella’s life has been a seamless series of visuals. “She … is beautiful.” The last syllable trailed off on the video footage, my grip on the camera wavering with fatherly joy. “She,” I said, my voice high-pitched and cracking with happiness. I remember my wife’s voice - fatigued and faint - asking from across the hospital room if Ella was OK. The image through the viewfinder blurred before the pixels snapped back into focus. My right finger looped around the top of the camera, toggling the lens of the camera to zoom in and capture a close-up. When I glanced away from the LCD screen of the video camera, I could tell that her first gasps were healthy because the delivery nurse was smiling at Ella while checking her vitals. ![]() She lay, eyes clenched in struggle, on a neonatal warming bed in an Overland Park hospital. ![]() Seventeen years ago, I pointed a gleaming silver camcorder at my newborn daughter as she alternated breathing and screaming during her first moments of life. Eric Thomas directs the Kansas Scholastic Press Association and teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the University of Kansas. Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of widening the conversation about how public policies affect the day-to-day lives of people throughout our state.
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