The cult of images

The pervasive preoccupation and distraction of human society today is the cult of images. It is so pervasive that we don’t notice it, just as we don’t notice the air we breathe. It’s so invasive, that we no longer feel violated by its constant presence even in the most personal and private places in our lives. We almost don’t believe we have lived if we haven’t a photographic, or better, a videographic record of ourselves. It’s no longer enough to do what we do, but we want to watch ourselves doing it. It’s as though, if we didn’t see it happen, then it didn’t happen.

Look at what has happened to the family photo album. We used to have a family album when I was a young child. The photographs in them were sepia-tone or black and white with wiggly edges and were mounted on black manila pages with little adhesive ‘photo corners’. The fun part was watching Mom or my older sister taking a tiny scratch pen, dipping it in white or sometimes metallic gold ink, and then carefully writing a description on the black pages below the more important photos. Later, when I was in junior high school, color photography began.

Then, we began to have more photographs, too many in fact, and though we tried collecting and mounting them in the family photo album, it got to be too small very quickly. So we bought more, and then when plastic ‘pocket pages’ appeared, a new kind of album came about, and soon we had more albums of all sizes than we knew what to do with. But do you know what? We didn’t look at the photographs in those albums half as much as we did when we only had one. Why not? Well, for one thing, where do you start, and where do you end, and where do you pile them as you go through them?

Where I just left off happened decades ago, and in my young adulthood and early married life I tried to keep up the frantic pace of image-making and image-saving. After a few years, and after four or five big binders of photographs mounted in various ways were filled and rarely looked at—except to be plundered when someone needed an old photograph in a hurry—all those images we forced ourselves to make found a new value stream: Looked at once, then stuffed back in their Costco envelopes, and shoveled into a big plastic bin with a lid. Soon that bin became almost too heavy to carry.

For me, this frenzy to photograph died out as my kids entered their teen years, and we fell between the technological cracks in the evolution of video equipment, so none of us appeared ‘in the movies’ until videographic technology reached the masses. Even then, it didn’t reach me. I think I’m the last person on earth who still doesn’t own even an ordinary cell phone—if they still exist! But everyone I know and their dog can now take photographs or video footage of the fly that fell into their bowl of cream of wheat just this morning. Think of it! Nothing to have to remember ever again! I have it all on film!

I’m afraid I’ve wasted a lot of your time if you’re still with me, when I really only wanted to say something very short and not so sweet. The world has once again pulled a fast one on us. Rather than to live, it has convinced us that it’s more fun to make images of ourselves and others living. The cam has gained entry into the most solemn and intimate moments of our lives, that sometimes we almost don’t do the things we are doing at all, because the hubbub going on around us, lights flashing, people dashing, crouching and slouching, trying to get a better view on film of our special moments.

Sadly, all material images vanish, often before those who want to use them to relive the past are finished with them, but sadder yet, the making of those images has robbed our experiences of being fully present, and so we have fewer real memories. Instead of remembering a wedding, or a baptism, or a forty-day blessing, or a memorial service, we remember a lot of activity caging in, and sometimes hiding from us, what was really important. The mania to videograph now even insists on entrance to experiences and events that simply cannot be recorded and capture anything of their real meaning, proving that ‘what you see is what you get’ is not always true.

When my boys were growing up, we went through a lot of shoes—boys grow fast, and so do their feet! Going to the ‘shoe temple’—the Nike factory outlet just around the corner—was a frequent pilgrimage. It used to bother me how what was once a mostly humble component of a boy’s wardrobe had suddenly morphed into something akin to a sacred, and expensive, object of athletic veneration. If the boys had kissed their new pairs of shoes, I wouldn’t have been surprised. This is another example of the cult of images, this time not a photographic, but merely a fantastical, image of the self. Men, I think, have always imaged themselves by their motor cars and their shoes; and women by their trophy men and their shoes. So shoes win, hands down, for both sexes.

The cult of images, a religious phenomenon? Yes, just as religious as ever, only the gods change. Where a religious ikon projects us beyond ourselves and our limitations, to experience the world of the Spirit in freedom, the cult of images as I have tried to describe drags us down in abject surrender to our fantasies, robbing us of real experience, real life, an endless cycle of bait and switch. A technological cult now, earphones engulf the ears, robbing them of the voices and sounds of life around them, tiny video touch screens ensnare the eyes and fingertips, robbing them of the sights and experiences of real relationships. This is nothing new, really. It all started with television. The world of Fahrenheit 451 robbed us only of our books. The Brave New World robbed us of our mothers. This new world of the Cult of Images robs us of our very lives.

Τεκνια, φυλαξατε εαυτους απο των ειδωλων
Children, keep yourselves from idols.
1 John 5:21