Smartphone Cameras Improve How We See
(This is not an April Fool’s joke.)
In the summer of 2014, when I started teaching The Interactive Vision, my social media photography course, as an elective at Quinnipiac, a local professor published a research paper that appeared to contradict the lessons of my course and everything I knew about photography.
A cognitive psychologist at Fairfield University, Linda A. Henkel, spoke on NPR about her investigations of smartphone cameras. Her study sent her students to Yale’s newly renovated art museum and had them snap pictures of the works of some artists with their phones and simply look at the pictures of other artists with their naked eyes.
The students recalled the details of what they observed with their eyes alone much better than what they photographed. This appeared to suggest that taking pictures with a smartphone was replacing our ability to remember. Henkel, in the interview, even referred to the phones as “external memory aids” diminishing our “mental cognitive processing.”
At the same time, I had photography theory on my mind as intensely as I did during my still photography classes at NYU. I had reopened Susan Sontag and Alfred Steiglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Bresson, and my notebooks and negative contact sheets from twenty years before.
The Interactive Vision had a similar goal to the first course I designed, The Interactive Voice. I concentrated on how interactivity had change word use and word forms. Now I wanted to do the same thing with imagery and photography.
I wanted to study how my students use digital cameras, how I use cameras as someone who learned on an entirely manual, 20th century, 35mm film SLR camera, identify the lessons that were still relevant and necessary from either process, and identify (or create) the exercises that would develop and maintain those skill sets now.
My thesis was also the same as the first course—that interactive photography was a more evolved and dynamic version of the original process as long as students used the original process to build their sense of sight.
Henkel’s 2014 study said we use cameras to avoid seeing. I maintained that photographers use cameras not just to enhance their cognition around sight, but to develop ways of seeing that most people never achieve.
People go to photo galleries and movies to learn how to see from the photography masters, but the masters will always tell apprentices, “I’m no master.” Professionals may have some natural talent, “a good eye,” but the camera and the process and the will to take many, many photographs taught them most of what they know.
Bestselling authors say the same thing. Talent doesn’t mean nearly as much as perseverance and practice.
Henkel’s study was called “Point and Shoot Memories,” and there has always been a difference between people who take photographs to study light and people who take point and shoot pictures to “say cheese.” The difference is in the photographer, not the tool.
I use my smartphone to snap a poster to remember a date or to snap a map or menu instead of memorizing it, but I also use my smartphone daily to see the world around me in a deeper way—to remember it better—because of my training.
Since Henkel’s study, even worse clickbait headlines have maligned smart devices for weakening our ability to appreciate beauty or remain present for an event at all. These articles play into our fears about new technology and make our desire to rip smartphones from everyone’s hands and throw them away seem correct.
The only correct thing to do is teach students how to use smartphone cameras well. The only lesson to learn here is we need better photography lessons in grammar schools.