Eva Bradley: Focus on experience rather than the image

Eva Bradley

How many times have you said in your life: "I'll just write that down, so I don't forget"? And how many times looking back have you ever then asked yourself: "So what if I had?"

I've often felt slightly worried, disappointed or just a little sad that I easily forget things. Significant dates, childhood birthday parties, special holidays or even more recent things like what I did with my day off last Sunday. But the beauty of that is how often I've been delighted because someone else has reminded me of one of life's lovely little forgotten moments, and we've enjoyed several special minutes together reminiscing, remembering and rediscovering forgotten moments with the same delight you feel when you discover something precious lost behind the couch years ago.

The problem with the modern world is that we never get a chance to forget because there is always (and I mean ALWAYS) a digital device of some description immediately to hand capturing anything even remotely interesting ... and everything else that isn't.

Perhaps my attitude to this new way of archiving memory might seem a little unusual since I make my living taking photographs of families and weddings for exactly that purpose.

But in that role in recent years I have had a rare opportunity to see just how quickly our emotional experience of the world around us has been invaded by a questionable desire to prioritise capturing that experience instead of well ... experiencing it.

The word 'capture' is grossly overused in the marketing hype that surrounds my profession and seems to ironically represent exactly what is wrong with how we choose to remember the moments that matter to us. Instead of experiencing them and locking away those experiences into a little archive in the heart and mind, we now put a portable device between us and the moments that matter, choosing to prioritise 'capture' over 'experience'.

Having experienced literally hundreds of weddings from behind several layers of expensive lens' in a bid to capture so that others can instead be in the moment, I presumed myself unable to be moved by emotional expressions of love and commitment by others.

Recently at a friend's wedding (which I was going to photograph until I thought better of it) I was amazed to find myself openly weeping as the bride walked down the aisle. Having thought I was well past being emotional at weddings, this proved to me that when we stop focusing on focusing our cameras and instead let our emotions have front-row seats, the memory (although not stored in the cloud and available for pixel-rich instant recall) is a far better one for the quality of the capture.

We now have the technology to freeze-frame every significant and insignificant moment in our lives, so what must follow is the discipline to know when to use it, and when to just be in the moment - one made all the more precious because of its fleeting nature.

How much value do we place on the single, dog-eared, sepia-toned Polaroid of Grandma at Christmas lunch circa 1977, compared to the thousands of digital images on our hard drive that seldom (if ever) get looked at? All moments in life are precious, some are precious enough to want them recorded forever. The challenge now is to recognise those that are too important to miss because we were busy configuring the iPhone when they passed us by.