The Perfection of Memory and Your Crappy Touristy Snapshots

I guess I have vacation on the mind, even though I’m not planning on taking any big chunks of time off anytime soon. Just that time of year, I guess.

I was looking at a BoingBoing item about a Web service called Tourist Remover — it lets you digitally excise stray tourists and other interlopers that are passing through your photos: All you have to do is take a few shots from the same spot, and the software will composite the images to form an idealized, intruder-free version of the view.

(A friend of mine on Facebook notes that similar functionality is available in recent versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.)

I’m kind of conflicted about this, for a number of reasons (not the least of which being that maybe I think too much about these things):

* Of course, there’s the whole idea that this kind of photo optimization takes us awfully close to the edge of the memory hole, where we augment and edit reality so that it better matches our idealized version of it. Then, over time, our memories are informed and changed by the photos, so that eventually, our modified memory becomes our reality.

This is a largely philosophical argument that looks kind of silly when you apply it to crappy touristy snapshots, but it’s still out there.

* On the snapshot angle — previously, I’ve ranted about the phenomena that’s captured in this photo — namely, a sea of digital cameras, taking the exact same crappy photograph of a moment in time, where no one photo is any better than the others, and where the very existence of the sea of upraised cameras spoils the shot, in one of those applied “forest for the trees” moments.

(Maybe there needs to be a “media pool” app for the iPhone, that disables all the cameras in a confined area except a few, whose photos are uploaded to a shared library, accessible to all there. Socialist photography, I know.)

With a fixed landmark (like, say, the Leaning Tower of Pisa), this effect is magnified by every crappy touristy snapshot that’s been taken by every person over the years, though it really hasn’t been accessible until people started sharing them publicly online. If you or someone you know isn’t in the photo, the photo you’re taken is simply redundant. (You wouldn’t, of I’m assuming, use a Tourist Remover-type application for anything except a crappy touristy snapshot.)

* On the other hand, distributed memory is great and all, but even if you’re just taken a crappy touristy snapshot, it’s still yours. After all, the perfect picture of the landmark has already been taken — it’s being sold for 35 cents in the revolving rack out in front of the t-shirt stand. But there’s a reason why we send postcards to other people, and take pictures for ourselves. Your crappy touristy snapshot of the Leaning Tower, or the Statue of Liberty, or the Eiffel Tower is something you can take (or at least share) ownership of. It’s why we don’t (usually) just do an image search and say “I was there.” So in that sense, ownership will always trump perfection.

Anyway, like I said, I’m prone to overthink these things. And, I too will continue to take massively redundant, crappy touristy snapshots of things that I could just as easily find on Flickr. Though I will use the excuse that the stray shadows, intruding tourists, and things growing out of people’s heads are part of the imperfections that make my photos unique and apart from everyone else’s.

Feel free to leave a comment if you can find something in there to comment about.