Imagine to Remember

When the camera was first invented, many Indigenous peoples refused to be photographed, believing something of their souls would be stolen in the capturing of their image. And while a selfie may not literally snatch your soul there is something to be said for approaching new technologies with a certain wariness. An apprehension that most modern people lack. 

We live in a world dominated by the image. Devices like the television, computer and smartphone, subvert the natural means of experience, through the senses. Experiencing the world through images is a poor substitution for the real thing. The image distorts the size, contours and frames of the original moment. All while failing completely to retain anything of its original textures.

Guy Debord theorized that modern society replaced real life with its representation, through the use of images, which he called the spectacle. And this replacement of the real for the represented diminishes our quality of life. This reduced capacity for life is manifest through separation and isolation which create disunity. Disunity from our fellow man, from the natural world and from our selves. 

The spectacle is everywhere.  We have gone, as Debord puts it from “being into having, and having into merely appearing.” This overarching metaphor of modern life, the pervasive spectacle. Even when we are alone we cannot escape it and so we never feel “at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.”

SR