Reality, as presented in a JPEG

Everywhere I go, I see the same claw-like hands, waving and gesticulating through the air, craned far above heads, and shoved low below knees. Wrists contorted into the most unnatural positions, they hunt, searching, aching in the most casual way possible to find the right angle, the right moment. It’s easy if you don’t care enough. If you don’t mind halting foot-traffic on a busy bridge, if you’ve lost the ability to be embarrassed by yourself, making alien movements in the silence of an extraordinary cathedral. Millions of people have walked these halls, stood where you’re stood, gazed up in awe at the handiwork of men and women whose labour is long forgotten, stonework and stained glass the only indirect indication of them ever having existed. And now you’re going to capture it perfectly on your Samsung Galaxy S20 FE. And you’ll think of your funny little caption, and you’ll post it on your funny little Instagram, and people will look at it and think “Wow, he must have picked a really good time to visit that cathedral, it looks completely empty.” And only you and God will know the truth - the reality of you standing there with your phone half-cocked for forty-five seconds, waiting, head-swivelling, a good-natured smile hanging loosely on your face as you silently beg people to move on a bit faster, waiting, still waiting. Waiting for the moment, that gap in the crowd where you can raise your phone, press the big dumb circle in the middle, and capture a perfect image. You’ll look at it later and think, wow, what a good photo! It doesn’t represent the reality of my experience at all! You’ll smile, there’s sixty likes already. You really are a photographer.

I recently drank four beers on an empty stomach and had an epiphany. Solo travelling in Nuremberg, I was having a very nice day. After abandoning a no-locks hostel that I’d stayed in the previous night, I wandered the streets of the city, aiming to make my way by no particular route towards the castle that loomed above in the distance. It was a Wednesday and the streets felt relatively sleepy, especially in comparison to the bustle of Bologna which I’d just arrived from, but it definitely wasn’t empty. As I walked, I took photos on both my phone and my film camera. There’s no shortage of great, classical architecture to be found in Germany, and I took quite a lot of photos, usually about three at a time, knowing that later I would be able to look through them and bin any duds. Passing round the back of a large church, I noticed a man in his forties, down on his knees, seemingly painting the bricks of the building. Identifying the novelty of the action, I stopped to briefly watch, before moving on up the hill and into the castle.

Unfortunately, ‘Nürnberger Burg’ was largely disappointing. It was a fun, steep climb up a large ramp to the gatehouse, but then once you’re up there, there isn’t much to see or do. There is a view out over the city, but the skyline of Nuremberg is neither New York nor Venice, and I would be surprised if a local could pick it out of a lineup. And there was a lady playing violin, but she was drowned out by the screams of excited schoolchildren. So I stood there at the top of the hill, for a while, and watched others arrive. Watched them have the same struggle I’d encountered, trying and failing to find good angles for photography that showed off, if nothing else, the size of the castle walls. I watched them inspect group photos after the say-cheese smiles were dropped, and watched as their faces turned into half-frowns as they discovered too late that they’d somehow stumbled upon one of the least photogenic historical sites on earth. As I watched, I came to the realisation that the alluring images of the castle that I’d seen on Google were almost definitely taken by some pervert with a drone, and that I’d be better off trying to take a photo of a full moon whilst standing on the surface.
‘Oh well’, I thought, as I ordered my third beer in the castle pub, ‘It is still pretty historic and delicious up here.’

On my descent into the city I felt looser, happier, and more in touch with the all-connecting spirit of the common man. It was sunny and there were more people out now. Tourist groups complete with guides, a busy market full of shit I either couldn’t afford or didn’t want, and classes of children who passed me on their way up to the castle, disappointment being nothing but a distant possibility to them. In the market I took out my phone to take a photo and found myself instinctively angling the camera skywards in an attempt to pre-crop the people of Nuremberg from my holiday photos. But something made me stop, and instead I opened my camera roll from the first half of the day. Photo after photo of empty streets and lifeless, beautiful buildings, blue skies seemingly my primary muse. I imagined myself one year on from that day, looking back at my holiday photos, and I immediately wanted to apologise to my future self for being so fucking boring.
I pulled up my camera and took the photo below.

In the cinema I always see adverts for phones that boast they have the most advanced photo editing software available. The cutting edge of digital fakery. Lamppost in the background of your graduation photo looks a bit shit? We can cut that out. Blurry stranger ran past just as you took the perfect post night-out selfie? Don’t worry, we’ve got your back. Stepson is just kind of ugly and ruined all of your wedding pics purely by virtue of being in them? We’ll make sure you never have to look at that disgusting little cretin’s face ever again.

When it comes to the game of ‘creating unique moments with people you love and committing them to a permanent state of memorable joy’, Predictive AI is completely changing the game. In a horrible way. In advance of this piece, I Googled the technology I’m referring to and found a Twitter thread in which the author describes new software that can compile the faces from multiple photos to create one, super, perfect photo. Meaning that if your rascal of a daughter pulls a silly face in a family photo, it’s okay, because your phone has the memory of a moment before the photo where she wasn’t pulling that face, and it will make the substitution for you. In effect, this means that in five years no one will ever have the argument of ‘Did you really have to post the only one where I wasn’t smiling?!’
Because you will all be smiling. All of the time.
Unsurprisingly, the comments on posts about technology like this are always full of people who pay money to use Twitter being like “Wow! This will be a lifesaver for parents!”
But is that what we want as parents? Or indeed, as humans? Fake photos of fake moments? Looking back at photo albums with your grandchildren in forty years and explaining with great embarrassment that there are some Real Oldies! in here, and that they better be prepared to see their grandmother’s face as it existed before AI began smoothing us all out - back when you could be caught off guard. Can you even call something like that a photo? An image where reality isn’t accurately portrayed, but neither is it expressed artistically? I wouldn’t call that a photograph. I’d call that a lie. And soon we might find ourselves fondly flipping through memories of lies that we once decided to tell, with no way to go back and re-learn the truth. Considering the recent phenomenon of phones and social media apps that automatically apply beauty filters to their default cameras, it’s beginning to feel like we don’t get a choice.

But not all attempts at modifying reality are completely soulless. Walking back through Nuremberg I stumbled once again upon the man outside the church, painting the brick. With all awareness of the self drowned out by four large beers, I stood watching him for some time, maybe five minutes. He had a number of materials next to him. Sand, paint, cement, and a few different types of what I’d call ‘brick crumb’, in varying sizes and colours. He carefully studied the patch of wall in front of him before setting to the task of mixing his resources together into a concoction expertly designed to match the lower brickwork of the church. Then, with a paintbrush and adhesive, he applied his remedy to the walls of a building that has been standing for seven hundred years. Eventually, I couldn’t resist a question.
“Excuse me, what are you doing exactly? Are you fixing the bricks?”
He turned around on his knees and looked at me, seemingly surprised at the interest.
“Not fixing, not broken. Just making pretty again. For picture.”
He smiled up at me and did a photographing motion with his hands.
I thanked him and asked if I could take a photo of him working, and he looked confused but agreed to it. It would have been too difficult to explain what was going through my head at that moment so I snapped a photo and turned away, noticing that a small crowd had been watching along with me. Backs supported by clasped hands.

Part of me wants to scream and rage at the historic vandalism involved in acts of ‘restoration’ to heritage sites and buildings. I see stairs in an old tower, worn by centuries of use, smooth grooves carved into wood cut from a tree in a forest that no longer exists. I see those same stairs, monuments to the existence of those who came before us, replaced callously with wood bought at a Wickes, and everything inside me is set aflame. But I do know it’s irrational, and that I’m wrong. The stairs must be replaced to save the building. All that is beautiful will one day wither, and all that is new will one day be old. It occurs to me now that this fear, of losing something old and important, is essentially the feeling that all of social conservatism is founded on. And it’s an understandable feeling, in the abstract, but a feeling that becomes much less coherent when you apply it to the reality of modern British conservatism, in which pundits argue not for the protection of ancient buildings, but for the right to continue using their favourite words for foreigners. As sea-levels rise and threaten to destroy the iconic and historic landscapes of Great Britain, conservatives are nowhere to be found. No, they’re too busy fighting the good fight, commenting on a Facebook post about how Virgin Media adverts used to only have whites in them. In a way, I feel embarrassed about sharing a common emotional ancestor with these people, and I wish to understand them less, but ultimately, I still can’t help that feeling that I get when I see relic replaced with retail. Art replaced with artifice. And I know that this is as much a part of reality as the frowny face in a family photo, or the imperfect framing of a beautiful sunset, but that makes it no less difficult to see.

Not every photo can, or should, be a computer desktop background. No one can deny the allure of landscape photography, of the feeling you get when you see a photo and immediately think ‘I want to go to there’. But there’s an affliction in approaching every photo with that intention, just as there is with the strange compulsion in those who find themselves taking, for example, three hundred photos at an aquarium. I once went on holiday with an ex-girlfriend, way before I had a phone capable of taking good photos. Upon returning to the UK, she shared the pictures she took with me. They were fantastically aesthetic photos of empty beaches, empty streets and empty cathedrals, but I didn’t recognise any of these places in my mind, and it felt like she’d been on a different holiday to me. The photos weren’t fake, not in the same way that an AI enhanced photo is fake, but they felt more like TripAdvisor photos than holiday snaps. One step away from Google Streetview, a road with all the faces blurred out. I now realise that upon seeing those photos, all those years ago, I unconsciously decided to emulate them, the blueprint in my mind. It feels fantastic to be able to blame an ex for this.

Anyway, I’ve decided that in future I’ll try to wave my claw-like hands around a bit less when I’m taking photos. It’s natural for beauty to be impeded by humans, and it’s human to not be able to capture all beauty. After all, Nuremberg Castle was erected over a thousand years ago, so those idiots had no fucking clue they were ruining my Instagram stories.