I’ve taken 263 photos since arriving in Venice, my husband has taken five – it would be nice to have a few more of me
‘I think you should take a picture of me,” I say to my husband, with slightly gruff embarrassment. We are on a long-planned, once-in-a-lifetime trip to Venice, undertaking a self-devised initiation rite for the empty nest stage of our lives: working and living in a single room for a month with our mildly demented dog.
I can’t stop taking pictures – 263 so far, and counting. Everything is beautiful: the luminous green water against faded yellow and terracotta, the bridges topped with smart Venetians looking at their phones, the glitter of sun or low-lying morning mist on water. I have to capture the joyful decorative flourishes: a stone camel here, a brass lion there, the five-tiered Murano glass chandelier surrounded by plaster daisies in the library where I’m working. My phone is packed with boats, a woman walking nine chihuahuas and countless gulls.
My husband is not taking pictures. When he does, it’s an event, not a habit: I think he has taken five since we arrived. But we are walking along a particularly fetching canal in the sun and the dog, falling apart but still elegant, like the city, is at my side. I have lots of my husband (OK, more of gulls); wouldn’t it be nice to have a few of me? He obliges happily, but I look self-conscious and awkward. It shows I had to ask.
Men don’t take photos. There are countless talented male photographers, but most men don’t seem to take phone pictures the way women do: candid, constant ones of their partners and families. I am in hardly any family pictures, except posed ones taken by friends or relatives. A social media post I saw recently of a sunlit, laughing woman captioned “filming myself for my funeral since my husband never takes photos or videos of me” was followed by a string of “so true” and “can relate” comments. We were already talking about this “image inequity” in my 00s blogging days, but it has been thoughtfully analysed in recent years. Are women taking on another responsibility, as family archivist and chronicler of daily life?
I wonder what role social media plays. Instagram, particularly, feels like a female space to me, though actually the platform has only a slight bias towards female users: maybe it is just that my friends are mainly female. I do put pictures up there, and I am uncomfortably aware of sometimes seeing experiences as photo ops. But most of my pictures are not for public consumption. I mainly want to mark our past selves – what we did and where we went. I don’t even print any out, though I should: if we have learned anything recently, it is don’t entrust anything precious to grandiloquent tech bros.
On one level, my husband is right. Holding up your phone is an imperfect and inelegant way of capturing a place or a feeling. That is the classic criticism of the digital age: we are recording, not living. He is good at being in the moment and that is exactly what he is doing here. He loves the people-inboats-watching and the shifting magic of the light as much as I do, but he is happy to simply enjoy it.
But I’m right too. Memory is unreliable: it is a story we construct for ourselves, not an objective truth. If I think about 2020, my chest tightens and I remember dread, grief and sitting at my desk seven days a week. But if I scroll through my pictures, it is all stupid family games, terrible haircuts and weird but lovely socially distant drinks and breakfasts. There is one son proudly holding a carrot he grew; the other sledging with his dad and the dog during an unexpected snowstorm.
My phone’s camera roll is a powerful corrective to my natural pessimism.
My brain will probably frame 2022 as the permacrisis, a time of global grief and fear. But my pictures will tell a different, also-true story: that perfectly spherical aubergine I grew; the sons I also grew. And now, a really good-looking gull or my husband enjoying an espresso. That is why I do it (and why I will keep asking him to do it). If happiness doesn’t come naturally, sometimes you need to take its picture.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
which he was elected president in June. The team’s supporters’ club published a statement on social media, warning Mitsotakis of a forthcoming “appointment at the polls”. In print, Marinakis’s newspapers went from dismissing the wiretapping scandal as “over”, to insisting it had only just begun. “Weakness, questions, impotence” ran the front page headline of Ta Nea,Marinakis’s daily newspaper. When Mitsotakis balked at Marinakis’s offensive, chalking it up to the threats of someone attempting to extract favours from the state, Marinakis fired back: “Only those who are implicated in wiretapping and the underworld would do such things.”
It all raises the question: who is blackmailing whom, here? The government that needs favourable coverage from a media tycoon as it heads into next year’s elections? Or an oligarch offering to bring accountability to a state that just so happens to have him under investigation for involvement in drug trafficking? In certain respects, the focus of the scandal has shifted, becoming no longer about wiretapping per se but about how the Greek state actually operates beneath the veneer of electoral politics.
Greece may be a small country, its GDP less than that of Peru, but its richest families possess huge fortunes and outsized influence. The postwar decades vaulted the country’s fabled shipping class into a position of unusual geopolitical indispensability, when they provided the vehicles – literally – of global oil dependence. Their money was made beyond Greece, typically stashed outside it, then sometimes used to acquire assets – TV channels, soccer teams, hotels – within it. The financial crisis of the early 2010s proved a boon, with EU-imposed austerity putting swaths of the state itself up for sale at a cut rate price, as the shipowners’ privileged tax status went untouched. All the while, the most powerful among them kept funnelling cash into the country’s political system, brokering opportunistic alliances with parties across the political spectrum that came – of course – with strings attached.
So entrenched is this arrangement – the interlocking of Piraeus’s oligarchic capital and Athens’s political machines – that in certain instances it has taken on generational form. Take Marinakis, who took over his father’s tanker fleet, and Mitsotakis, who took over his father’s political party: the relationship between the two dynasties – whose scions are now claiming to be victims of one another’s exploitation and blackmailing – goes back at least 40 years.
It’s little wonder that wiretapping crises have been recurring in Greece for decades now. Such a system of subterranean glad-handing requires not just cash but also collateral of the type that rogue spyware campaigns are likely to be adept at harvesting.If there was any reason to be optimistic about this latest scandal, it might have been the opportunity it presented, after a decade of financial upheaval, to be transparent about a reality that virtually everyone in Greece rails against and yet no one of any political stripe makes any great attempt to dismantle. The irony of Marinakis’s intervention is that it would have probably never happened had an earnest investigation been conducted in the first place, months ago, when news of the spyware scandal erupted in Athens. But instead, Mitsotakis’s government cast blame on “dark outside forces”; his intelligence agency reportedly destroyed crucial files; and his party is alleged to have blocked witnesses from testifying. He has called the accumulating allegations “an unbelievable lie”.
And now a heavy-handed oligarchic intervention is masquerading as an overdue push for public transparency. Mitsotakis limps around the pitch as Marinakis grins from the sidelines. All the while, ordinary Greeks wait for the contest to end and the answers to come.
This article was amended on Monday 21 November 2022. A shortened version of a quote from Ioannis Vrentzos was misattributed to Evangelos Marinakis. The attribution has been corrected and the full quote given.
Alexander Clapp is an Athens-based freelance journalist and fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford