don’t move!
We are in Paris for the New Year.
We have taken Lisa’s sister Nicky and her two twin children, Amy and Ben (both 14) to Paris for the holidays.
None of them have ever been here before, so it’s been a great experience for them. Top of the Eiffel Tower, dinner at Guy Savoy and yesterday, a visit to The Louvre.
This is, of course, a required stop for every tourist – and like every tourist, we were required to pay a visit to DaVinci’s Mona Lisa.
The lines were unbelievable. (Well, it is the tourist season – ironically one of the reasons I like to get out of NY during the holidays).
There was a 3-hour wait for tickets for The Louvre yesterday. Fortunately, the concierge at the hotel had reserved them for us. Even so, the crowd was extraordinary.
So we shuffled along like good tourists on our round of the stations of the cross – The Winged Victory of Samothrace, The Venus deMilo and of course, The Mona Lisa.
Now, a curious thing happens at The Mona Lisa.
Everyone (and I mean everyone) whips out a phone or a camera and takes a photo of the painting.
I would say that 80% of the people there were taking photos with blackberries or iPhones.
Now, the quality of the photo is not great. In fact, it is terrible.
The crowds are so enormous that the vast majority of people end up simply holding the phones over their heads and eyeballing the screen for a clean shot -that is, without someone’s head blocking it.
Why do they do this?
Why bother?
If you want a picture of The Mona Lisa I was going to say you can buy a postcard for 1 Euro, but in fact, you can just download one.
Here you go:
But this obviously is not why they take the photos.
It’s not for the quality of the reproduction.
And in fact, it’s not to own a reproduction.
I think it’s more a sense of “I am here”.
The taking of the photo seems to create an ‘event’ at the end of a pilgrimage. It seems to mark the final act of the trip.
Once people take their shot they are content to move on to the next icon, having fulfilled their mission.
There are apparently some 9 million visitors to The Mona Lisa each year. And apparently, at least according to Wikianswers it is illegal to take a picture of the famous painting. That doesn’t seem to stop anyone, as far as I can tell.
In any event, if half of the visitors to the Mona Lisa take a photo – and there were far more than half yesterday, then there are some 4.5 milloion images of the Mona Lisa created each year just from visits to the Louvre. 4.5 million bad images.
What happens to them?
Why do people do this?
I think it has little do with photography and much to do with our desire to leave a mark – like grafitti.
A few years ago, Lisa and I went to The Great Wall of China, and what we noticed there was the grafitti as well
If you go to The Temple of Dendur at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY, you’ll be able to see grafitti from all the visitors dating back 3,000 years.
With the arrival of smart phones, pretty much everyone has a digital camera with them all the time. And this notion of capturing images at random – marking your presence – is going to become ever more ubiquitous. As the cameras get better and more and more of them have video, I think we can expect an expansion of the videoization of everyday events.
Is there a way to marry this to the Facebook phenomenon of sharing?
I bet there’s something here… somewhere.. buried in that enigmatic smile.
