Photu, Please

There are those who love to be photographed. You can find them “photo bombing” frames where they have no business to be in. But they are there, smiling sheepishly. I don’t understand this propensity especially in this day and age of social media when we are inundated with photographs. Everyone and their cousin has a photo phone or camera phone and they are constantly clicking away. Or worse, videoing.

People are literally photographed during every stage of their waking (and sometimes sleeping) hour and the various states of their existence is subsequently fed to the public whether they would like to consume it or not. One of my friend’s kid practically grew up on Facebook. Actually almost all of my friends’ kids grew up on Facebook. “He said ‘coo coo’ today,” gushed the mommy with a photograph of the baby, appearing in his diaper looking irritatedly at the camera. Within seconds the emojis were flying… .love, like, ‘aww’, ‘lol’ etc. Being slow on the uptake, I was debating whether to press any button.

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My racing mind was telling me, “What if the kid decides to sue the parents when he attains adulthood for invasion of privacy? What if we all, the aunties and uncles, get implicated for supporting such invasive behavior?” Then there are the “film your food” brigade. No longer can I go to a restaurant with a friend who doesn’t fish out the photo phone to film the contents of what she or worse, I, just ordered. The fried fish captured on camera with my friend’s photo-bombed face peeping out from the sides of the plate is somehow not as appealing any longer as when I ordered it.

And other than the live demonstrations of this food photography we are also regularly regaled with recipes from friends and family. Sometimes I want to say, “Spare us the details,” but that would be rude so I hit the “thumbs up” icon. Getting back to the original question: With so much photography around, you would think that people’s desires or needs to be photographed would be sufficiently satiated. So why do people still have the desire to be photographed? In the days of yore when photography was rare, people would deck up to the tee, pose and try to project their best angle in an attempt to look perfect to the world because the snap would be passed down to posterity.

While contemplating all this, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe it’s not the fault of the perceived photo-bomber at all. Maybe the photo-bomber just happened to be there because everyone’s camera is always clicking these days. Are we all inadvertent photo bombers then? Who is to say your visage didn’t get squeezed into the heart-shaped gap between the lovey-dovey duo’s heads in the restaurant where your friend was filming the hapless fried fish? Like the proverbial ‘kabab mein haddi’? (Don’t expect me to translate this….look it up on Google using your camera phone for all I care). Or what guarantee that your head is not bobbing up and down on the phone screen of the passenger sitting next to you on the airplane making a video as the plane is about to take off.

To be sure, the airhostess’ angry visage as she instructs her to switch off has popped up on the video screen making her a photo-bomber. I have no idea how many photos/videos all of us are a part of these days….must be hundreds and thousands. We have no control over it. I have memories of the days when camera phones were rare. I had gone to Agra to cover an event. I had travelled alone and had gone to the Taj Mahal. I don’t usually like to be photographed. But a local photographer convinced me “Ek photu please, Madam” (one photo, please). Who goes back from the Taj Mahal without that customary photograph. Today I would have just taken a selfie maybe. Or maybe I would have been an inadvertent photo bomber during someone else’s photo shoot.

(The writer is Editor, Features)