Where will it all end?
Autumn 1987 was a very special time for me.
You see, after ten years of trudging back and forth to the Immigration and Naturalization Service – a US Government Department which proves that a little power is a dangerous thing – I was finally sworn in as an American citizen.
This conferred certain advantages. I could now vote and, if things did not work out as I wished, complain without fear of reprimand. The occasional cry of “Go Home!” could be answered with an assurance that, like Bubba, I too was an American.
Now it’s true that the privilege of voting didn’t quite work out as I had hoped. My first ballot in a presidential election, cast in 1988, was for a fellow who asked that I read his lips and that there would, as a result, be no new taxes. Well, he lied. Not a good start.
Further, unlike Bubba, were I to be found wandering the streets drunk and disorderly, I could be repatriated to the tender clutches of British socialism, unlike my wife and son who had the good sense to be born in the United States.
Finally, unlike Bubba once again, I paid more than my share of US tax, a status unaffected by my enfranchised status.
No matter. I was delighted to be an American and part of a system that had offered me nothing but opportunity at a time when success was an option, not an entitlement.
So what better way to celebrate than to visit the monumental spaces of the west, not just the Grand Canyon in Arizona but the far subtler beauty of Utah, best seen in Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon. At the citizenship ceremony, in a Los Angeles Coliseum convened as a Federal courthouse, we were all given American flags to wave while a movie displaying the grandeur of this great country was shown to one and all. I waved my flag energetically, together with the Russian Jewish refugee on my left and the Vietnamese on my right. And there and then I determined to see these great spaces for myself.
No need to dwell on these landscapes at length, for photography cannot do them justice. You cannot smell the pristine early morning air or hear the birds. What I do recall most clearly, however, was the presence of Big Brother in the guise of the Kodak Corporation.
This is at Bryce Canyon.
If I recall there was even a pair of footprints painted on the ground where you were expected to plant your size twelves before pressing the button. Now you may argue that this was a solid, capitalist move. You take better pictures and Kodak makes more prints for greater profit. But the most troubling aspects of this wretched plaque make you question whether photographers are really such mindless dolts that this sort of desecration of the outdoors is really called for.
I thought no more of this idiocy until the other day when I saw that the latest ‘feature’ in point-and-shoot digital cameras was something named Smile Recognition Technology. Before we dwell on this latest invasion of freedom of thought by our burgeoning computer age, let’s step back and see what great things automation has done for photographers.
It really started with late nineteenth century Kodak advertisements with their unforgettable promise:
“You press the button. We do the rest”.
Brilliant. Simple. Obvious.
In the twenties, manufacturers began to build in failsafes so that you wouldn’t double expose or miss a frame, though the lens cap still fooled most, until the SLR came along. (”Honey, the camera must be broken. I can’t see a thing” was a not infrequent reaction to the SLR lens cap in those days).
Then it was pretty much status quo for the best part of the remainder of the twentieth century until exposure automation came along with the Minolta Himatic 35mm camera. Zoom lenses replaced shoe leather and autofocus became standard – assuming you knew what to focus on. Most did not, so faces were still blurred and brick walls behind them sharp as a tack.
And that, in a nutshell, was it for automation, until recently. Sure, digital came along (what thrills, you no longer had to wind on the film) and now Kodak no longer did the rest, until people began to realize that Walgreens did a better job of printing than they could at home. So that nineteenth century Kodak ideal was once more realized, the only difference being that you no longer had to hand in your camera, film and all, for the rest to be done. Oh! and lest we forget, the printing was now done far better by Fuji, who had built a better mousetrap.
Computers changed all that in the past decade. One device told the camera to negate your shakes for a sharper picture. Without a doubt the greatest modern enhancement of image quality. Flashes would go off automatically, unprompted, when the lighting conditions dictated. Wonderful, even if no one told sports fans that their flash was less than effective at 200 feet.
So there you had it. Auto focus, image stabilization, auto advance to the next frame, auto exposure, auto flash. And still most point-and-shooters took crappy pictures.
So along came face detection technology. It wouldn’t do to have the user point the camera at his nearest and dearest. Big Brother determined that refusing to take the snap until the face(s) were placed just so was what was prescribed. And, finally, smile detection. Yes, unless you smile, you cannot take a picture. Grimaces not allowed.
And duffers still take godawful pictures.
Maybe that 4″ x 5″ auto-nothing Speed Graphic really did get it right. It kept the unspeakable from taking pictures that were unbearable.
