The Digital Camera
He wanted to remember every moment. I did not.
by Arianne Cohen
March 10, 2008
I have a theory that travel is a test of whether your relationship is a ticking time bomb. A few days on vacation is a condensed form of your future life together: What sort of space you'll make your home (the hotel), whether you'll be high rollers (the budget), what time you'll get up in the morning (the wake-up call). Travel details are a proxy for personal values. So as I watched Alexy plan our trip to San Francisco, what I really wanted to know was: what will our life be like when we're married?
The blueprint for our future wedded bliss began on a promising note. He sat on the hotel bed and leaned over the tour book with a highlighter, cross-referencing a map. A half-hour later he nudged me. "Okay!" he announced. "So today, we'll start at the maritime museum. And then we can do the cable-car museum. And then we have to ride the cable car back to the hotel!"
Less promising. I had been hoping for something romantic, maybe a hike or a culinary tour. Anything other than a day centered around semi-obsolete forms of mass transit. I should've known before we'd even boarded the plane that we weren't on the same page. Alexy is the sort who reads biology journals for fun, the sort on whom subtlety is lost. A week before, he'd thought that a movie date at his place meant we were going to watch a movie at his place; he seemed genuinely surprised to find me getting naked during the opening credits of Notes from Iwo Jima. So when he asked me to accompany him to San Francisco two months into our relationship, I should have realized he didn't know that romantic trips have meaning. He just wanted to go to San Francisco, and figured two people are better than one.
I agreed to let him have his afternoon transportation-museum boner while I wandered Fisherman's Wharf, but first he made a peculiar request. He pointed to his digital camera on the dresser. "Hey, would you mind taking my photo?"
"You want a photo in the Comfort Inn?" His hotel choice — small, dingy and remote — did not bode well for our future home.
"It's where we're staying!"
This, I couldn't argue with. I looked through the viewfinder: polyester curtains, television welded to the wall, factory-produced artwork, florescent bathroom lighting, Alexy goofily grinning: Click.
Fifteen minutes later, as we strolled over the hill to get a glimpse of the bay, Alexy wanted another photo of himself. Five minutes after that, we reached the beach via a hair-raising scramble down a rocky embankment. "Let's take a photo here!" By which he meant, let's take a photo of him. He flashed the exact same smile as he had in the previous two photos. Click. Then we reached the walruses. "Ooooh! Lets definitely get a picture of this!" Alexy with marine mammals: Click.
The nearly continuous requests for more pictures of himself continued throughout the morning, and I recalled his Facebook page — true to the site's nomenclature, his profile was a virtual shrine to his own face. If you've ever visited a social-networking site, you're familiar with our culture's relentless tendency to document ourselves, something bordering on self-worship: look where I live; look where I've been; look who my friends are; look at me. Though Alexy would occasionally ask me if I wanted to be in one of the pictures with him, most times he was happy to be the only one in the frame (at the end of our trip we had thirty-four pictures of him, four of me). And even when he would ask, I'd generally decline — a silent protest against his insatiable desire for more self-portraiture, which I couldn't help but find somewhat repulsive. And so, just as certain cultures believe that every photograph steals a bit of a person's soul, every banal Alexy snapshot snatched a bit of my hopes for a mutual future.
If I seem like a killjoy, it's only because I see little value in taking a bazillion posed, poorly framed and lit photographs, with the purpose of creating fake memories. And I think excessive documentation is particularly tainting in romantic relationships; it's made them seem less authentic, a bit too implausibly lovely, a little too ready. Whenever I'm dating someone new, friends immediately ask to see a photo of us together — they assume I captured on film the transcendent magic of dates one through three. They want to know why I don't already have his photo as my screensaver to prove that I'm head-over-heels. Forget about the actual experience of coupledom, an awkward, non-linear affair that's hardly ever picture-perfect. I find over-documenting relationships to be like showing too much skin — the unrecorded knowledge of what's underneath should be part of the allure, not something you can upload and crop until it's flawless.
The next evening Alexy and I visited my friend at the Googleplex. Sergey and Larry had gone overboard on design: a huge model airplane hung from the ceiling, cubicles were made of inflatable tents. Alexy wanted to document himself in the vicinity of all of it: sprawled on a beanbag chair in the play area, eerily staring through the glass phone booth illuminated by florescent lighting.
I didn't know what to do. He was so immensely focused on creating fake memories of our trip that our actual experience was lost — particularly mine, since I was watching the whole thing through a viewfinder. But I couldn't tell him he was acting ridiculous, because this is what people do now. The tourist haunts were filled with Alexys: dads holding up camcorders for forty minutes at a time, walking slowly with the gadget in their outstretched arms like a Frankenstein sightseer. We passed the office of a Google employee who'd hung dozens of photos of himself with famous visitors, creating a wall-sized montage: Google guy with Bill Clinton, Google guy with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Google guy with celebrity after celebrity. Alexy positioned himself in front of the wall and asked me to take his picture.
My patience broke on the way back from Google. Alexy wanted to stop so I could shoot him standing next to the Golden Gate Bridge, despite the fact that we had photos from the other side. Now it was cold, and I didn't have a coat.
I dutifully clicked, documenting the lack of fun. Except his camera had, shockingly, run out of batteries, and I couldn't make mine focus at night. He fiddled with it. "Shoot. We need to figure this out."
"Alexy, I don't think we need to figure this out. It's the most photographed place in San Francisco. We can buy postcards."
But a postcard wouldn't work in the iPod slideshow he'd make when we got home. He continued taking photographs with my camera for another ten minutes while I shivered in the car, watching him demonstrate his personality flaws in real-time. At home, I uploaded the photos, and realized there is one small benefit to overdocumenting vacations: In the few photographs with me, I'm grimacing and clearly annoyed; he, of course, is wearing the same goofy grin. Our body language is horrific, our hips pointed in opposite directions, like two strangers smooshed together on a bus. You can watch the relationship fall to pieces, frame by frame, in brilliant high-resolution color.
It was all over a week later. He ended things, perturbed by my inexplicable hostility to his need for infinite self-portraiture. "You know, I've been picturing where I am in my life right now . . . " he said by way of dumping me, but I already knew — I'd caught the slideshow. n°
©2008 Arianne Cohen and hooksexup.com