The iPad began to buzz disconcertingly as I was tweaking a comment on the blog.
The temptation was to play hot potato with it and throw it across to my husband. A call was coming through on this futuristic little tablet, and it wasn’t just auditory.
We pressed the little red button to accept the call.
And there, on the screen, was one of my best friends.
Soon we will be blase about a sight like this: but as soon as she appeared, grinning, on the screen, sixty-odd miles away but instantaneously in our bedroom, pandemonium broke out.
Everyone talked at once and not a single syllable of what anyone said made sense.
Folks seemed to want to make gruesome faces into the camera. My clever, dashing husband became almost indistinguishable from that erudite soul, Animal, from the Muppet Show. He said nothing, and grinned manaically.
My daughter’s sense of humour went into overdrive and hysterical giggles were the order of the day. My son capered around showing off diabolically.
When everyone had calmed down and all participants listening once more, we wheeled the pets on, just for whimsy.
Barley the blonde bombshell retriever had been wagging her Rapunzel-tail in the background of our friend’s conservatory. She attracted much comment when we were calm enough to talk coherently.
I seem to remember Kit Kat, our satanic tortoiseshell, had a walk on glare; followed swiftly by jet-black and slightly bemused Opus, the remote cat.
My friend’s affable husband ambled in. He hadn’t a hope of getting a word in, but he smiled and we just knew, between our exuberant shouts, that he wished us well in our incoherent babbling.
My godson pottered in: he has just had a landmark birthday and celebrated by being a zookeeper for a day. Who could have predicted he would return home to a small ipad screen packed with even more wildlife.
What a blast.
Everyone was so dazzled by their own cyber-reflections, it did make me wonder, fleetingly, whether that old adage about a camera stealing one’s soul might hold water.
It can have a strange effect on the best of us.
It was in 1793 that someone began to try to fix the ephemoral images that brush our retinae during our waking hours. It must have seemed as distant to the man on the Clapham Omnibus, then, as finding a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow.
First, you have to find something which reacts to light; and then you have to make the image stay there. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a French scientist, noticed that silver chloride darkens when exposed to light. But after dabbling with this he settled for bitumen mixed with lavender oil, and coated a plate of pewter.
He put the plate inside a camera obscura, a device which projects an image of what’s going on around it onto a screen. And eight hours later, an image was there to greet him.
He called it ‘heliography’ which roughly translated means ‘sun writing’.
Ever since that first image, recorded indistinctly in 1819, there has always been a faction which would rather not be sketched by the sun..
We call them camera-shy; those who hate their image being captured for posterity. Its a fairly new malady in the history of mankind, but whole cultures have woven a dislike of being photographed into their beliefs within the last two centuries.
Tacked onto the biographies of those who have shaped our recent histories are hints at just how uncomfortable some of them have been with the theft of split-second moments of their existence.
TE Lawrence used photographs extensively, even early in his life when he was studying history at Oxford. He spent two elysian summers cycling through France collecting photographs and measurements of the country’s mediaeval castles, and another in a 1000-mile walking tour of Ottoman Syria, looking at crusader castles.
But photographs of him are thinner on the ground you might think. For one who wheedled whole tribes in the battle against the Turks, he didn’t like the camera capturing his soul.
Another modern day camera-shy giant in the wings: Arthur W Page, who was communicator to the US Troops during the second world war. His official title: Head of the Joint Army and Navy Committee on Welfare and Recreation.
Those were his words that President Truman announced on August 6, 1945: “Sixteen hours ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam’ which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.”
Words to blow a chill through the soul. Yet his face is rarely seen. His words are his chosen snapshot; it seems a grim legacy.
Many of us are fascinated by our own image. Others avoid it like the plague, conceivably because they might lose their soul, but more probably because one freeze frame can so often misrepresent one.
The moving image, now: that’s a different matter. Cinecameras have caught our posed moments for decades: but now, during a simple telephone call, we find ourselves off guard and full of ingenue.
We can watch ourselves moving in a way few humans in history have ever done before.
But when do you call ‘cut’?
Kate Shrewsday 
Dropping the bomb was not necessary and the argument the its used saved hundreds of thousand of lives by making an invasion unnecessary is nonsense. By 1945 we flew overJapan with impunity. Dozens of cities were fire bombed with deaths ranging from 15,000 to 50,000. The spirit of Japan was already broken. How long could they sustain that murderous bombing? The bomb was dropped to keep Russia in check although I concede it was built to use against the Axis. It was not necessary to use in 1945.
I agree totally, Carl. I can not see how a weapon like that could ever be justified, to be honest. It’s inhuman.
I have yet to enter the era of visual communication. It will no doubt come. Maybe not too soon – some people it is painful enough to hear!
The camera-shy thing is strange. What can a camera show that isn’t in daily view to all those who come into contact with one?
What indeed?
I think it’s a view of oneself. We don’t watch ourselves in action, only when we’re preparing to be seen: and when someone catches a still it doesn’t always marry up with how we think we look.
Hearing myself is bad enough: I don’t want to see myself as well. (It’s bad enough when I inadvertently sit in view of a mirror in a restaurant. I mean why are they there? Who wants to watch themselves eat? Uurrggh!)
Won’t be jumping on the FaceTime bandwagon anytime soon, than, Pseu ? 😀
I’ve never tried it, but instinct tells me I won’t like it 😦
it is an acquired taste, Pseu…
I can’t stand seeing myself on Skype but I have to overcome it as I Iove seeing and talking to my grandchildren in Norway. You are right, one freeze frame can misrepresent one. Years ago one of my friends showed me a picture of herself smiling, whilst holding her young daughter in her arms. She asked me what I thought of the photo, and I replied that she looked like a happy young mother with her child. She said I was quite wrong, she was in the middle of having a nervous breakdown.
It is amazing to be able to talk to friends and relatives in this way isn’t it, Rosemary? And to your grandchildren this is the way things are, and talking to grandmothers via a screen is routine. Amazing.
Photos never tell the whole story. And for centuries we have been misrepresenting ourselves with a range of consequences…look at the Flanders Mare…
I have NOT wanted an iPad (since I barely use my cell phone).
Now I do (want one) . . . what FUN!
Glad you all had a blast. 😀
It certainly adds a whole new dimension, Nancy: but any laptop with a camera can do the job just as well. My friend downloaded an app for 79p and we were off! Fab!
I haven’t even gotten around to a smart phone. Mine is dumb, and I rarely use it.
Niepce’s “First Photograph,” “View from the Window at Le Gras,” is on permanent display at the Harry Ransom Gallery in Austin (except right now it’s out for conservation assessment). My husband took me to see it on our first date. Much better than country western dancing.
Oh, that’s a lovely coda to this, Kathy! Phil was waxing lyrical after he read this, saying the View from the Window is a kind of bridge to another time What a fabulous place for a first date. Now that’s the way to sweep a lady off her feet 🙂
I’d be terrified if someone rang me and caught me on the loo!
Fortunately one can choose whether to answer, Cindy 🙂
Ah, so much to ponder here. Where to start? It’s late in the day and the day has been trying, so, I’ll cut, and say how well done this was, Kate.
“When do you call ‘cut'”, indeed, Kate – as you say, our self-image and photo image rarely align..
On the subject of the camera obscura, I recently saw a rather fascinating doco on the Turin Shroud which posited that the shroud was created in stages by none other than Leonardo da Vinci with something resembling a camera obscura
eeeek!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the pleasure of chating on the phone in the bath – poof! that one has gone. the pleasure of snuggling in bed and chatting to pepople one should impress (and can do when it’s just the voice) also GONE!
what a dreadful idea!
yesterday I was chided by someone for not having taken my cellphone with me when I left the office. that was immediately squashed when I said “but I went to the loo”. (apparently something no one expects me to do during the working day).
NOnono – video phone must have only one place (where I can keep the background tidy) and I can check my hair isn’t standing out at all angles.
😀 Being available and impeccable 24 hours a day would be an awful strain, I have to agree, Sidey. But its a great way to show your dog or cat off to their best advantage.
I think we all agree that our image of ourselves is far different from a photograph, be it still or moving… Personally I am very camera-shy – vanity, I think? I have read about the Shroud of Turin and apparently there have been extensive tests carried out although I’m not sure of the outcome. I agree it is wonderful to have photographs of loved ones and our pets to remember them by. As for Skype, I can’t believe that it is possible for me to speak to and see my brother in London with no time lapse whatsoerver – wonderful!
it is extraordinary, isn’t it, Adeeyoyo? I hadn’t thought about the shroud of Turin; must scurry off to check out that angle!
I don’t know how to break it to you…the man on the Clapham Omnibus never did find gold at the end of the rainbow.
I know. I am he.
Love it, love it, love it!! Don’t know how many attempts we will make before being able to hold a sensible conversation though! It was the first time I have known my husband and son to be pretty much speechless as they gazed at the chaos in front of them! We may find ourselves having to retreat to a lockable room, just so we can talk without crazy children and face pulling husbands interrupting, but it was so much fun seeing you all in the flesh, which just doesn’t happen often enough these days.
The feeling, as always, was mutual, Nix 🙂 Sunday evening cracked me up…
I think Skype would be better if you couldn’t see a little picture of yourself in the corner. (Maybe it’s possible to turn it off, and I just haven’t worked it out yet.)
I read a post the other day from a woman who’d gone a month without looking in the mirror, and she found the experiment made her not only less critical of herself, but of others.
I did wonder how different life would have been when humans had only the surface of a still pond in which to observe themselves. I suspect people were altogether nicer. But now I sound like I’m harping on about ‘the good old days’ and that’s never a good sign…
Stace, it sounds a really good experiment. I wonder why it resulted in her being less critical of others? It’s almost enough to send me off to try it myself….
I love chatting to my children on Skype when they’re not home. So long as all’s going well… there’s not much worse than seeing one of them in tears several hundren miles away…. hearing it on the phone is one thing but actually seeing them in front of you is ‘orrible.
My daughter and I sometimes have an “apéro” together or perhaps even supper if we’re both alone. It’s very companiable and totally different to holding a phone receiver.
Gosh, great to hear from someone who has embraced the whole FaceTime thing. What a great idea! Next time Phil’s away we can still eat together!