Mollie Shiflett ’26 is a double major in history and linguistics, not that she knows what to do with that. She is one of the captains of Women’s Club Soccer Gold for the College of William and Mary and is an avid fan of most sports — except golf. Email Mollie at mrshiflett@wm.edu.
This article is going to sound a little ridiculous, and to be fair, any article about pet peeves sounds ridiculous to any person who doesn’t share that random dislike. For context, I just spent three weeks in Rome, and I did all of the things that tourists are supposed to do: I ate pasta, I ate pizza and I took a lot of pictures.
In the digital age, pictures are status. A teacher of mine in high school always liked to say “pics or it didn’t happen,” which is a bizarre thing for an English teacher to say, but it demonstrates how much of a premium younger people have put on pictures. Pictures go on our Instagram pages or they get sent to our friends and they seem to be serving less as a reminder of the beautiful things and places we’ve been and more as a status symbol. “Look where I was,” then slowly devolves into “look at me.”
I’m not saying that taking pictures is inherently a bad thing. I take pictures, so a lot of this article will be tainted with a whiff of hypocrisy, but there just seems to be a particular kind of picture taking that seems to come from a place that values appearances over substance.
My friends and I woke up — a little too early, in my opinion — to go to the Trevi Fountain two days before we left. It’s one of the things you just “have” to do if you’re in Rome. You have to toss a coin into the Trevi Fountain and you have to take pictures (or a video) while you do it. And this is where my issue is. My friends and I came prepared with our phones — which, if you were wondering, is the absolute max you need — and stood in line until 9 a.m. However, while we just had our cell phone cameras, other people had EQUIPMENT: selfie sticks and collapsible stands and all kinds of other things that I have never seen before in my life. All of this to take pictures of themselves standing alone. Not even with family or friends, although some were with friends and family (and these people are definitely less annoying than those who were going to all this effort for a solo shot).
What my critique boils down to is this: Taking a picture should never become more of an event than the subject you’re trying to capture. Pictures are there to serve our memories, to bolster them when they grow hazy and the corners of the mental images fade. What we take a picture of is what should matter. I’m not sure that all of that extra effort to make sure that you’re in the picture is worth it. But maybe that’s just me.
I guess what’s most important is that you like the pictures you take, but I don’t know what it says about us as a society if having a picture of us in front of one the greatest artistic marvels is more important than a picture of the marvel on its own. To me, these kinds of pictures seem to do more to service our own brand of vanity — the 21st-century Narcissus that all of us seem to embody — than they do anything else. I don’t often take pictures of myself, but I know that lots of other people like to. All I want people to do is take a minute to feel all of the emotions and all of the wonder and all of the things that we can blunt within ourselves when we spend too long focusing on ourselves instead of the world around us.