IN THEORY: Personal Space, Propaganda?

The idea that photographic opportunities are extensive and readily available, now more of right of passage for anyone who has grown up in the late 20th and early 21st century and has motor skills, has become a subtle yet unchallengeable pillar of American culture. Of course, humans have always been intrigued by images, even those that we compose in our heads, since a facet of truth is always related to expressing or capturing it in image form.

This thought occurred to me today while I was working in my high school library, sitting in a hard standard issue desk chair with my shoes off, reading up on Sontag. As I watched a student draped in a Guatemalan flag take pictures of a friend with his point and shoot, I wondered if it even occurred to him now astronomical the act he was performing was.

Obviously it wasn't to him. He was just digitally recording time, immortal until deleted, space frozen in a limbo between artistic vision and reality. His friend, who held her hand up in protest to the camera imposing on her personal space, unwillingly sat through this charade until he lowered the camera and turned it off, not realizing that as long as you are in public, personal space seems to deteriorate and becomes a blurred line of limits and risk taking.

Her reaction is what really intrigued me; she seemed to be protecting something from the lens, as if the camera held a power she wished to defy, to deny anything and everything she could. Like the primitive cultures who believed taking your picture would capture part of your soul forever. Maybe we haven't moved out of this mentality. Maybe with the proliferation of images in our lives we are trying to retain something from the camera, something that can be just ours.

So the question becomes...

How much are you willing to show?

How much are you willing to take?