I’ll begin with some lyrical digression…about photography…it was in this adventure in particular, when public obsession with selfies stroke the eye…January is a busy tourist season in Indochina, so there were a lot of people around. But there were even more – smartphones, iphones, tablets and other fancy gadgets, through which the public observed the world…Literally. Wherever I’d turn, fellow tourists weren’t really looking at things, there were looking…into their cameras, telephones, pods, etc. Even at the concert of tradition dancing we attended in Siem Reap, most of the audience watched the show through the tiny lenses of the technological aid, often even streaming it live into social media threads…I have to say – the amount of gadgets per person have made me sad…Have we lost our ability to see in a wide-angle range of vision, have we lost the ability to absorb the scents, the colours, the textures…is it true that it has become more important to capture every detail separately instead of taking in the whole wider picture of wonder?!..I’m almost certain that most of those tourists, when they returned home, won’t even bother to upload, save the gazillions of pictures they took, won’t page through them in a few years’ time in nostalgic impulse…Don’t get me wrong I myself am guilty just as much of taking unnecessary shots…I was in shock by the amount of the pictures I brought back and that made me re-think the whole concept of capturing the memory…do we really need to keep a shot of a fragment of a bas-relief wall, if in a short time we already won’t even remember where we saw this wall and what was the whole bas-relief picture about…I suddenly felt nostalgic of those times of 35mm films and limited chances to capture a really good photoshoot that made you choose wisely what do you want to snapshot. This last travel reminded me of the real value of the memories: the best way to observe the world is when what you’d keep in your memories – is the wholesome holistic picture of the wonder.
