Happiness And Photography

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, I occasionally crossed paths with a certain other newspaper photographer when I photographed dress rehearsals for ballet and opera. After shooting a suitable number of pictures of a rehearsal, I would leave the theatre. But this other photographer always stayed behind. He put his cameras on the floor and watched the remaining rehearsal. I thought he was being lazy, just sitting there and not taking pictures.

It took awhile before I understood what he was doing. After that, I also stayed with my cameras on the floor and just watched.

We didn’t realize we were making memories, we were just having fun.”

– Winnie the Pooh

When you’re busy taking pictures, you don’t truly experience what you’re photographing which means you won’t create direct memories. You will only have memories tied to your pictures.

To rephrase that: Taking pictures of something only gives you an illusion of being involved. You’re there but you’re not experiencing any emotional connection. This is why news photographers can remain detached from what they’re photographing whether that be an exciting sports championship or a horrible tragedy. Every news photographer will tell you that they don’t feel emotions until much later when they’re examining their pictures. At this point, they’re reacting to their photos and not to the actual event.

Experience, Memories, Happiness

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman‘s research into happiness showed that we each have an “experiencing self” and a “remembering self.”

The experiencing self lives in the present and it collects our emotions as they happen. Our experiencing self is our subjective and conscious awareness of living in the present. Kahneman says these moments of awareness last about three seconds and we have perhaps 600,000 such moments per month. Most of these moments are never remembered. Better experiences can increase happiness *in* our life.

The remembering self is the memory of our past experiencing self. It maintains the story of our life by organizing our collected emotions. The remembering self makes our decisions because decisions are based on memories of past experiences. Better memories can increase happiness *with* our life.

Which is more important, the experience or the memory?

Memories are what we keep from our experiences. This means that we need better or fuller experiences to get better or fuller memories. This suggests that you can increase your happiness by utilizing or energizing your experiencing self more. Be present, in the moment, more often.

And that’s what that other photographer was doing when he put down his cameras and watched the ballet and opera rehearsals. He was fully experiencing the event without a camera in the way.

He may not have known it but he was creating better memories which increased his happiness. The look on his face as he watched the rehearsals said everything.

Photography creates information not experience

In his 2014 book, Happiness By Design, behavioural scientist Paul Dolan writes that happiness isn’t what we think but rather it’s what we do, what we experience. He suggests that giving more attention, and ideally full attention, to what we’re doing will increase our happiness. Being happier in an activity will give us better memories.

In the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, actor Sean Penn plays a photographer shooting for the last issue of Life magazine. There’s a scene late in the movie where Penn’s photographer character is in the Himalayas trying to photograph an elusive snow leopard.

When the cat appears, the photographer doesn’t take any pictures. When asked why, he replies, “Sometimes I don’t. If I like a moment, I mean me, personally, I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera. I just wanna stay in it.”