Beyond Rivalry

(Short answer, no, not any more than we ever miss the moment.)

Thank god, an answer to this age-old question with an explanation I can accept, from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.

Someone asks him "Is taking a photo or video of an event for later viewing worth it, even if it means more or less missing the event in realtime? What's better, a lifetime of mediated viewing of my son's first steps or a one-time in-person viewing?"

Cowen's main response is two-fold:

"If you take photos you will remember the event more vividly, if only because you have to stop and notice it. The fact that your memories will in part be 'false' or constructed is besides the point; they'll probably be false anyway. In other words, there's no such thing as the 'one-time in-person viewing,' it is all mediated viewing, one way or the other.  Daniel Gilbert's book on memory is the key source here.

One of the comments, though, brings up the common theory that taking pictures can be a way of hiding behind the camera, making us merely observers of participants, creating distance between us and what we are photographing. This seems true at times for me, particularly at parties or group events -- I like to have a role that supercedes the social requirement of chit-chatting -- but not in the garden, while travelling, taking photos of close friends or family, etc. Even at parties, I feel that I am participating by being an observer, and sometimes the role of photographer seems like the role of therapist: people will reveal things they might not otherwise, because I am hidden, because I seem neutral, because I am part machine.

(Photo taken today. The robin pair, whose nest this is, was not happy to find me in the garden. I wasn't happy to find their nest so close to the ground -- in a rhododendron shrub -- knowing that neighbours' cats stalk our yard.)