Lasting Impressions

Smartphones have changed the way we take photos forever but, says Olly Mann, we've lost some charm along the way

I’ve only seen one photo of my great-great grandparents, because only one photo exists. She is half-smiling, in a black dress with grey-white pearls, caked in powdery makeup. He is bald, stern, with spectacles, and a woollen waistcoat. I can’t, off the top of my head, recall their names but, without a moment’s pause, I can summon their image to mind. My entire life, they’ve gazed out at me from Grandma’s "occasional table", framed in light mahogany; the pristine linen tablecloth underneath their portrait mirroring the table they’re sitting at, captured in monochrome.

My austere ancestors came to mind today when I heard that— even taking into account the small downward blip in photographic activity that accompanied the global COVID lockdowns—we Earthlings now create over 1.4 trillion photographs per year. That’s quite some statistic when you consider that, at the turn of the 21st century, Kodak’s estimate that 80 billion photos would be taken in the year 2000 was considered newsworthy enough to herald in a press release.

The proliferation of smart phones changed the game, of course. Nowadays, rather than ask as we did in the analogue era, "should I take a photo of this?"—with all the time and financial cost that implied (developing, printing, purchasing new film…) we now find ourselves asking, "why NOT take a photo of this?! I have a camera in my pocket! Hold it, flash bang wallop!"