In the age of social media, photographs are no longer photographs but rather considered content. With most photography being taken and consumed on mobile devices, it’s easy to fall into the trap of taking photos and leaving them on our phones, hard drives, or cloud storage. That’s when photographs remain as files and are never fully realized or experienced as photographs.
I’ve always felt that photography is best consumed as a physical medium. The light and moment immortalized by a camera forever live on a piece of paper that can be felt and framed. A digital photograph remains as bytes on a hard drive, the experience varies from device to device, with most photographs being consumed on small 5-6 inch displays.
With digital photography, you can take 1000s of photographs on a single SD card. The only financial aspect was the cost of the SD card. When you make the intention to print a photograph, you commit to a certain degree of financial commitment. That doesn’t mean you should be spending hundreds of dollars on paper and thousands on a professional-grade printer. I’ve been using a Kodak Dock Printer for quite a few years. It runs for about $120, you can easily get a cartridge and 4x6 photo paper.
The Kodak Dock Printer is small and unobtrusive. You ca easily connect it to your phone (iPhone and Android) via a small dock connector on the top.
Small 4x6 prints make it easy to sort and arrange photos to see which ones works and which ones work better together. Sequencing photographs is an article onto its own, but to keep it short, its easier to sequence photos when you can hold them in print form as opposed to doing it through a screen.
The exchange between Data and Captain Picard from Star Trek : First Contact comes to mind:
Data: Sir, does tactile contact alter your perception…?
Picard: Oh, yes! For humans, touch can connect you to an object in a very personal way, make it seem more real.
A small sequence of photographs, easy to rearrange to see what works and what doesn't.
Its a tremendous feeling when you a see an image you took gradually appear on a piece of paper. At that very moment a set of bytes and pixels become a photograph. A moment gone in time, but is now immortalized and its something that only you saw.
You can also frame prints and hang them around your house or workspace. No batteries or power supply needed.
We’re living in times where social media usage leads to mental illness and social anxiety. Once you start printing photos, you’ll have a large stack of photos in no time and holding prints of photographs that you took, can fill you with a sense of pride that you’ll never get from social media validation.
Photography is more than just filing up hard drives. You created something that no one else noticed or saw, and it deserves to be put into the real world and not left to languish on hard drives on the cloud.