Some time ago, I cam across an advert of Google’s Pixel phone. The ad showed a cool feature called “best take”, in the larger series of photo “correcting” features, of the smartphone – ensuring a group selfie where everyone in the group has the best smile and no one has their eyes closed or something. And it’s not just Google. Samsung Galaxy and other phone brands have similar features too.
How does the phone do it? It takes multiple selfies in quick succession, selects (with the help of AI) the best facial click for each person from across the multiple takes and stitches them together in one single photo. While it is indeed a cool feature, technologically, it’s a whole other story philosophically.
In the era of smartphones when everyone can click a photo of the most mundane things ever, engineers are busy not only developing those photo-clicking devices but also software features to make those photos “better”, for example – by applying beauty filters or make the photos more “fun” by adding dog-ears, cat-whiskers or something. Within this field, companies are coming up with features like “magic eraser” that removes “photo bombers” or other unwanted people from your photos, “zoom enhance” that lets you zoom a part of the photo without losing the quality, and lastly “magic editor” that lets you make all sorts of editing to your photos – move an object, make it big or smaller, remove it altogether and so on. With so much editing going on, do photos even capture reality any more!
Photos were supposed to capture a moment. Even before cameras were invented, people posed for hours (people with hours to spare, that is) to have a “moment” captured in painting. It was a composed reality but was still quite close to reality. But after the invention of cameras, a photo came quite close to capturing a moment in as much reality as possible. Of course, the photographer could still fabricate the narrative around the photo but still. And now, with all these photo editing software feature, you would think that there is no reality any more. The photos aren’t capturing a moment as it was any more, they are capturing a moment as we wished it was.
Though, to be fair, we humans don’t remember things as they were any way. Our brains weave a specific narrative around an event and that’s what our memory reflects of the scene and not what the scene looked like in reality. (It’s exactly this fallibility of the human brain and memories that magicians take advantage of … politicians and tricksters too!) So, in the end, what Googles and the Samsungs are doing is to introduce this fallibility, but in a controllable way, into the otherwise infallible software. Yes they are creating a “fake” reality but it’s okay because it’s a reality that we want to remember anyway. When I remember the Paris trip with my parents, all I remember is that the three of us visited the famous Chateau Versailles and took a photo in the grand hall of mirrors. I don’t remember the 200 other people who were also in the room. And if the photo, after having been touched up with magical eraser, shows exactly that (though I am not sure if it can erase 200 people), then what’s the harm?!
Though, to be even more fair, no amount of photos can compensate for the memories we have of an event or a scene in our heads. We only want these photos to show off to others our adventures, our exotic trips or expensive lifestyle. (In the past, we also used to want photos to remember certain precious and rare moments but that is hardly the case any more) So, it feels a bit perverse to create photos and to creatively edit them to satisfy our (increasing) narcissism, our tendencies to show off, our unquenchable thirst not to do things but to be seen doing things.
In the end, the truth is that such photo software features are invented because there is a market for it, because millions upon millions of people want them. Otherwise a company wouldn’t invest resources in developing them in the first place. Who am I to judge!? I am anyway not the target audience for these companies. I take maybe 10 photos on a 5 day trip and select only 2 out of them to show to my family when they insist. I hate taking selfies and own no selfie-stick. And I don’t purchase phones by camera megapixels and other photo-editing features. But all that doesn’t stop me from philosophizing on the topic, does it?