For reasons I’ll keep for another time, I’ve been learning about conventional pre-digital cameras. That’s analogue cameras that you put canisters of unexposed film into, and take up to 36 blurry photos that you don’t get to see until you’ve paid for them to be developed.
As part of this adventure I bought a second-hand Pentax Spotmatic SP-II, manufactured the year after I was born. The description said the mechanism was fine but, when it arrived, I found exactly what I expected – the viewfinder mirror was stuck in place, so I couldn’t see what I was trying to photograph. A YouTube search, a similar quest to find my tools, and more than a few swear words later, it was all fixed. Cue feeling competent.
I like taking photos. I have a digital camera I like, and of course most of us carry a camera in our pockets, built into our smartphones. Samsung and Apple market their flagship phones by touting their camera bona fides, and there is even an intriguing generation of new phones coming through that have analogue components – mechanical apertures, for example – to appeal to nostalgia and the feeling that it must be better to do it the old way.
The first time I came across the use of photographs in research was in a presentation about using ‘photovoice’ to capture insights into people’s own lives, from their own perspectives. I can’t recall the details of the research itself, but I remember being struck by the idea of giving young people disposable cameras, showing them how to use them, then sending them off to record and narrate the important things in their lives. After that we might sit down together and analyse their data.
Personally, I take photos of sunsets and sunrises, flowers and birds, with my conventional camera. And then I try to find time to go back and look at them, to relive the moment they were captured. I feel this is good for me, and there’s now a good amount of evidence to suggest I’m not imagining it.
Before 2010, photography came up in psychological research mainly as a tool, like photovoice, for understanding things like young people’s mental health, or experiences of prejudice. Since the mid-to-late 2010s, there’s been quite a lot of work on using photography as an intervention, to help people’s mental wellbeing.
The earliest study I found was around 2015, and compared mood effects of taking “mindful, creative photographs”, “neutral, factual” photographs, or completing a written gratitude exercise. Mindful photography had the same positive benefits as counting one’s blessings. In this example, photography is the tool to encourage being in the moment. If you feel weird writing in a gratitude journal, whip out your camera.
A subsequent review article in 2020 describes several ways that photography-based interventions might help mental wellbeing. A common finding is that people say they felt empowered, either through the autonomy of the photographic process, or from the skills and enjoyment that they developed. Some studies have not just encouraged participants to take photos but to exhibit them collectively, and this also made participants feel more in control of their lives and the ways they used photographs to tell and own their experiences.
As I’ve noted, you don’t need a conventional camera to take photos, and there is research that shows the ubiquitous selfie can also have benefits, like feeling good about yourself, documenting your experiences, expressing yourself and connecting with others. But they can also have negative impacts if you’re doing it for ‘likes’ (your selfies are extrinsically motivated by seeking validation), or make you feel worse as you compare yourself with other people.
So here’s my prescription for the week: take a moment in your busy day to find somewhere that resonates with you, get out your phone/camera and take a moment to think about what to photograph – then do it. l
