This is an opinion piece. The views are the author’s own.
At some point in the last decade, the default way to experience something became filming it. Concerts turn into a sea of glowing rectangles. Birthday candles get blown out twice, once for real and once for the retake. I’m as guilty as anyone. My camera roll has more photos of sunsets than I could ever look at.
It’s easy to sneer at this, and plenty of people do. But I think the sneering misses something. The problem isn’t the camera. It’s how we use it.
What the research actually says
The case against constant photo-taking has some real evidence behind it. In a study reported in late 2013, psychologist Linda Henkel of Fairfield University had students tour a campus art museum and either photograph or simply look at certain objects. The next day, they remembered the photographed objects less accurately and recalled fewer of their details. Henkel called this the “photo-taking impairment effect.”
Interestingly, a second experiment found an exception. When people zoomed in to photograph a specific detail, their memory for the whole object held up. Paying close attention seemed to matter more than the camera itself.
Henkel’s point was that “the ‘mind’s eye’ and the camera’s eye are not the same.” She also suggested that the sheer volume and disorganization of our digital photos discourages many of us from going back to look at them, which means the photo can’t do the remembering for us either.
Later work has found the effect to be stubborn. A set of three lab experiments with roughly 400 participants, reported in 2022, found that taking several photos of paintings, even from different angles, still left people with worse memory for details than simply looking.
So that settles it, right? Put the phone away? Not so fast.
The other side of the lens
A 2016 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, led by Kristin Diehl of the University of Southern California, ran nine experiments with more than 2,000 people. Participants did things like taking a bus tour or eating in a food court, with or without taking photos. In most cases, the photo-takers reported enjoying the experience more and feeling more engaged with it. In an eye-tracking experiment at a museum exhibit, people who took photos spent more time looking at the artifacts.
There were limits. Photos didn’t help when people were already actively involved, like doing a craft project, or when clunky equipment got in the way. They made an unpleasant experience feel worse. And the researchers noted that the benefit depended on people actively choosing what to capture, not on cameras that record everything automatically.
Put those findings side by side and a picture emerges, so to speak. Taking photos can pull us into a moment. Leaning on the camera to do our remembering for us can let some of the details slip away.
Choosy, not anti-camera
That is why I don’t buy the purist position that real experiences are camera-free. Photos are how many of us share our lives with people who couldn’t be there. They are how grandparents who live far away watch their grandchildren grow up. That matters.
What I’ve stopped believing is that more is better. A hundred photos of one dinner aren’t a record. They’re a chore no one will ever sort through. So I’ve started trying a simple rule: take the photo you actually want, then put the phone back in your pocket and look with your own eyes.
Some small habits that help:
- Decide what you want to capture before you pull out the phone, rather than filming everything “just in case.”
- Take one or two shots, not twenty.
- For live events, record a short clip of a favorite moment, then watch the rest.
- Notice one detail you didn’t photograph, and describe it to someone later.
None of this requires a digital detox or a lecture about being present. It just asks us to remember that the camera is a tool for noticing, not a substitute for it.
Sources
- Source: No Pictures, Please: Taking Photos May Impede Memory of Museum Tour (Association for Psychological Science)
- Source: Our memory is worse for things we’ve photographed, even when we’ve taken multiple photos (British Psychological Society Research Digest)
- Source: Take a picture, you’ll enjoy it more (ScienceDaily / American Psychological Association)