I’m not a mathematician, but I imagine that there is no way to calculate the number of photos taken every second on the planet. Trillions? That infinite number of selfies resting in the cloud has been studied even by psychoanalysts. Vanity? Desire for survival? Why do we all smile in them? Hidden desires for happiness? Questions without answers.
When in 2008 the Aguilar publishing house published my book in Madrid Project Hopeone chapter of the book was: “Tomorrow we will all be photographers.” We already are. Better or worse, but soon even cats will take photos. And the cameras of a day will be left for museums.
Despite the criticisms sometimes made of this exuberance of trillions of photos that soon there won’t even be room in the cloud for them, I have to confess that there is something hidden that some new Freud could explain, since it has to do with the unconscious, with life and death. I still have a yellow paper photo of me when I was three years old eating a piece of dry bread with a happy face. It was the time of the Spanish Civil War when children, almost all of us, were starving.
I don’t know if the cloud will return to us tomorrow photos of today or if children, more photographed than in all history, will have one like mine of bread as adults. The cloud swallows them all and maybe even eats them. All this to say that despite all the criticism of this river of photos that are shot every second on the planet, they are not always vanity. They are something more difficult to define.
Just a few days ago, my colleague Lorena Arroyo, one of those colleagues who is always cheerful but whom I don’t know personally, sent me a group photo with this message: “Dear Juan, I am in Tepotzlán, Mexico at the wedding of some colleagues from the editorial team: Almudena Barragán and Elías Camhaji.” All young, all happy. I don’t know any of them personally, but I felt ashamed when I criticize the flood of photos that plagues the world. I don’t know why, but that detail from colleague Lorena made me think that many times we get stuck in stereotypes and perhaps this desire to perpetuate oneself in photos is something more than pure vanity. So what? Ask the psychoanalysts.
Perhaps it is true that there exists in all of us a nameless desire, not so hidden, but real, not only to perpetuate ourselves, to stay for those who will come after us, but also from an emptiness of sharing life, of wanting to give ourselves, of fear of loneliness, of a way of not disappearing forever. Childish? Perhaps, but that child that we all carry within us, that invisible angel to whom we prayed as children, who evokes peace and who casts out the demons of discord, of the tears of the soul, remains hidden in the folds of our unconscious, of our desire to share, of not being forgotten.
If this is true, we were right when we worshipped the team of professional photographers in the newspaper’s editorial office with their respect-inspiring cameras and said that sometimes “a picture is worth a thousand words.” This was certainly true of the one by the colleague of this newspaper who, in the middle of the Brazilian jungle, captured a pirate hiding out cutting down trees with a chainsaw and wearing a T-shirt with capital letters that said, what a terrible irony!: “ECOLOGY.” My colleague’s photo said a thousand times more and better than my entire report.
Perhaps it is because of the importance of a good illustration that the information or analysis of this newspaper gives so much emphasis to graphic illustrations. I have heard some readers, friends of mine, say that these illustrations are sometimes more eloquent than the article itself. Perhaps that is why children, by instinct, like illustrated books so much and painting, whatever, with lots of colours. And today they are also born photographers. And listening to and analysing the unconscious of a child was and always will be a kind of wisdom.
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