It feels strange as an "elder millennial" to look back at the past and present as someone who lived through the transition from analog to digital. My mother took many photos of us growing up. It was on film, which had to be sent off for development. She wouldn't know whether the pictures were right for days or weeks.
My nieces and nephews have no concept of this. Not do they understand television before streaming services. Or long-distance phone call costs. In the past, a photo, or a TV show, or a phone call, had to be a calculated choice. Now, we have phones full of snapshots we may never look over again. We get spam calls from autodialers and A.I. chat it's on the other side of the planet spoofing a local number for caller I.D.
I went off on a tangent there, but I won't delete it. Back on track: in a way, technology has trivialized what was once momentous. Those old black-and-white photos were an event. Even if film exposure no longer required holding still for several minutes, it was an expensive, time-consuming occasion people planned to have. At the time, people likely thought it a trivial thing compared to an oil painting, though. How strange. But now, snapshots and even filming something already digitally available is so easy we don't think about it. perhaps it's a signal to be more deliberate about more things we do.
Straight from the title of my blog, in a way. Slow down. Be present. Don't always think about the future or how something might look to someone else. Just experience it.
I loved your tangent.
The first time my family had a camera, we didn't really have a camera. My brother, who lived with my grandmother because he was ill, came over with a Brownie. He took pictures of us when we were in the field next to our house. I think he was lonely and he wanted to bring us back to my grandmother's with him. I didn't see those pictures for years, but they are among the very few I have of my childhood.
So yes, picture-taking was a big deal.
Funny how culture evolves.