Photos as memory markers
Dustin Curtis:
For years, I’ve taken photos as memory markers. Whenever I want to remember a moment, place, or feeling, I pull out my phone and snap a photo of whatever I’m currently looking at. There’s no art involved, and I don’t try to make the photos look good; I just try to make sure there is enough information in the frame to give a good understanding of the exact moment I’m trying to record…
The photos have formed a profound and very high resolution timeline of my life. They are my story…
Since 2007, for similar reasons, I’ve done what Dustin describes above. These photos include significant milestones along with the mundane moments of my life (random example).
I’ve used a number of different services over the years, but like Dustin I settled on Posterous until they were shut down. I used Posterous because of the simplicity in posting. It was as close to frictionless as possible.
There was a major issue with Posterous: it was public. There’s something too personal and risky about exposing our intimate and unfiltered experiences publicly. It’s why we fall back to success theater and it’s why our sharing changes as our network grows.
Ultimately I overcame my concern with Posterous’ lack of privacy, relying on the vastness of the internet to find privacy through obscurity.
This meant that I couldn’t share a photo from the site with anyone. Sharing one photo meant sharing the entire stream.
And so, for a period of time, when I wanted to share photos of this sort with my wife, we relied on a private Tumblr site. We’d login, post a photo, and the other person would login to see the update. It was delightful to see glimpses of each other’s lives like this.
The feeling that came from being able to ‘look in’ on the day-to-day bits of my wife’s life was so profound that to this day I wish I had a way to see into the lives of family and close friends with the same fidelity.
Why hasn’t this happened? Back to Dustin:
When mobile photo sharing was first becoming popular a couple of years ago, I thought the winning app would facilitate the sharing of photos like these, as memory markers, not as symbols of artistic expression. If you want to share a moment with someone else, using a photo is still the highest resolution way of doing it; you can get so much information from a quick glance at a picture. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Instagram handily crushed the competition by focusing on filters that take boring photos of moments and turns them into beautiful, rarely-posted forms of artistic expression.
Instagram happened first for a number of reasons. The growth opportunities afforded to an open network, the velocity of content in an asymmetric follow model, the lower perceived risk in sharing expression vs experience, … all combined to create Instagram’s explosive growth ahead of photo services focused on sharing experiences and moments.
Because Instagram went first doesn’t preclude other services from finding success today. Macro trends — such as the mass adoption of smartphones, the continued evolution of the type of photos we take, and even the broad use of Instagram — suggest that now is a better time for a service focused on sharing raw experiences to emerge. Given the value I’ve experienced from even duct tape solutions to this problem, I’m excited about what’s to come.