A quick peek into Selfies

I saw my first “selfie stick” at Epcot Center this past year.  Perhaps I had seen them before, but just not put two and two together to realize what they were used for. I can’t tell you how hard it was for Michele and me to get a selfie with us and the sign at Big Bend National Park behind us. The stick would have made it so easy.

But I think the stick also says something about us as a society, as well. We had to make an invention that would allow us to take pictures of ourselves in front of monuments and attractions. For what purpose?  To prove we were there?  To honor ourselves as being important people? 

 It all seems a bit narcissistic, to me. Call me old fashion, but you used to ask someone, “Hey buddy, can you snap a shot of my wife and I as we stand here and look like total geeks in front of Mickey’s ears?” And normally the other person would oblige with no questions asked.  He might even ask for you to return the favor with him and his twelve kids all from Akron, waiting to board the Disney Express.  And you would. You didn’t need a stick.

But today we’ve got sticks. Long Sticks. And if you’ve been to anywhere half-way historic they are all around.  Sometimes they are so prevalent in a location it is like trying to fend off branches in a rain forest.

I have never understood why it is so important to have pictures of ourselves at allocation. The location itself should be photographed with great care, preserving memories of it for our future. But instead, now we have a group of grinning tourists (ourselves included) in front of Rushmore or the Grand Canyon or Lincoln’s Monument.

My parents used to travel quite extensively and my father was somewhat of a photo hound on trips. And in almost every picture was my mother.  Here’s is Edith at the Pyramids. Edith at the Taj Mahal. Edit at Old Faithful. Here she is again in Tehran before the fall of the Shaw. Brandenburg Gate…there’s my mom. Every picture. 

So one day I asked him, “Why do you always pose mom in the pictures?”  He said, “To show we’ve been there.” But every picture? He continued that I just didn’t understand photography.  “People make shots interesting.”  I agree.  But not my mother seven hundred times.  It’s other faces with craggily lines and squinting eyes.  It’s women balancing loads on their heads as they walk along dusty African paths. It is the soldier— the guard at London’s Buckingham Palace or Rome’s Swiss Guard at the Vatican.  People are incredibly interesting. But not my mom over and over and over. (She was interesting…but I’m talking photography here.)   

And then there’s today’s selfies. Our faces in every shot of every imaginable angle of every thing to see in Washington, or New York, or Chicago. Museums, wharfs, battle fields, historical sites, the selfie is now front and center.

I don’t get it. We are not that important. And besides, all you have to do, is tell someone, I was there.  I don’t need to see you and my mother seven hundred times.

It is said, “Pride cometh before the fall.” I think vanity fits in there somewhere, too.