I want to smash them all

Living with cameras all my life, it has pretty much become instinct to, when a camera is in fact recognized, associate said camera with a smile, or the grimace often brought forth by those who reluctantly accommodate the demands of thrice-said oh-so-powerful camera. I've often wondered what exactly people did with their time when cameras did not exist. And were those people ever happy? Their smiles are not documented to show the laughs they are meant to represent; we do not nor ever shall know.

It is very interesting - and partially confusing - to me when we take pictures that aren't considered "artsy" (I throw that word around freely), we are obliged to smile in an unnatural moment, so that when we look back on such pictures we can perhaps falsely remind ourselves of how happy we were. What is this obsession with happiness that we must force ourselves to contort our face (and with some "picture" smiles, I do mean contort) for the sake of a set of false and misrepresented memories? I look upon pictures and see them as lies because they cover up the complexities that make up a human and its relationships. Is not a family portrait just a veil over the nuclear family ready to blow apart some buried matter from years before? I do not believe this is a particularly negative or cynical view on how the modern family is built either; we are human, and even if we are family - even if we have been made from the very cells of our parents, and my sister and my brother are connected in a way that no other human can be connected with me - we are human, and we have the remarkable ability to construct such complexities that even the constructor becomes confused out of its manifestation. I think ignoring the melancholy and the frustration that a family or a human relationship endure makes the very beauty of that relationship meaningless.
"I will always appreciate bad days like this/'cause they grant me a point of reference in regards to my happiness"

I look at family pictures in my hallway or my friends hallways, and I see something that is meant to be sentimental and deep but is impalpable and meaningless decoration. There is no aesthetic value and no underlying emotional value. I think we would much rather benefit from a photograph that shows a "darker" side of the human character. Not to impose dreariness but to show the life and complexities of it. At that point we can emphasize the "dark" with the spontaneous and "light".


I'm not necessarily complaining, I'm just contemplating on what seems like an absurd tradition that western families seem to hold dear. I'd much rather have a family painting that illustrates a family through the use of imagery and mediums, lines and spaces, movement and unity. Perhaps portraits only exist to capture the changes of physical appearances. Seems almost like a waste of space though, having to replace a nice one every couple of years to keep up with an ever running time.

Your friend,
Alex