Many years ago I was at a wedding of an old school friend. It had been gorgeous, kelims under oak trees with champagne flutes and sushi.
A wonderful dinner with old friends and then finally, my favourite part of the evening – dancing! I was one of the first people on the dance floor and the music was fantastic. I had had plenty of wine and was really grooving and loving it. Suddenly the lights went on. I looked up, bewildered. What’s wrong? It took me a while to figure out what had totally destroyed the ambience. A videographer was standing on a chair boldly said, “Please carry on dancing I need a good shot”.
“Shot to the head!” I thought.
This is the memory I am left with from my friend’s lovely wedding. I felt fury and disappointment at having my happy experience ruined by the need to have it all on video. In that moment I swore not to have one at my own wedding.
That was 15 years ago, before everyone had a smartphone to record what they were eating for dinner. To my mind, our obsession with recording everything gets in the way of our having a real experience – as opposed to an ‘I’m on camera’ experience which involves pulling in your tummy the whole time. I feel something has got lost in the constant digitisation of our lives.
I recently went to a very beautiful Buddhist ceremony performed by three Tibetan monks who were in Cape Town to create a Mandala of compassion for the South African people. It took them two weeks to make this exquisite symbol. Then in a ceremony with chanting and praying, the sand from the Mandala was thrown into the sea. The story was about the impermanence of things. It’s a beautiful notion that you can work for two weeks and create something exquisite and then discard it into the ocean.
There were parts of the ceremony that were difficult to see and were interrupted by the massive lenses of cameras and video cameras. Our experience was completely disregarded by the people who felt they were invisible (no, you are not) and felt they had a licence to impose their huge cameras in the faces of the Buddhist monks (who handled it with incredible patience and aplomb).
I sat there wondering “What is more important here, the moment or the photo?”
The physical mandala may have been an exercise in transience, but the recorders were hell bent on making sure that nothing would be lost or forgotten.
My wedding?
We had gorgeous photos of all the lovely moments, but our photographer had clear instructions “You are recording what is happening, you are not what is happening, we don’t want anyone to know that you are there”.
He totally got it and did an amazing job.
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