In “Death of the Masterpiece,” Istaara Amjad ’28 explores our ever-changing relationship to art in the modern world. 

When it rains in Islamabad, you don’t need to check the weather forecast: Instagram will make sure you know. It is a predictable phenomenon — every single one of us rushes to capture the sight of the clouds against the hills as if it is our personal discovery. Clicking through our feeds that night, we experience an endearing exhibit of countless angles of the same cotton candy clouds. 

The camera is an integral part of our lives. Whether we are snapping a picture of our latest meal or posing with a friend, there is no doubt in our mind that these experiences are worthy of being recorded. 

As eager as our parents’ generation is to discredit the superficiality of the Gen Z picture obsession, the urge to capture our lived experiences is not new to humanity. From Realism to Warhol’s Pop Art, art movements have been pushing to glorify the everyday for centuries — none more so than street photography. 

The genre found its footing with the invention of the portable camera in 1888. Here were artists who dedicated their time and efforts to building a monument to mundanity. It was not their attention to detail, but the spontaneity of the camera that was able to accomplish what no other medium could. With neither the artificial pristine of the TV nor the obscure symbolism of the written word, photography appears to be the most objective of any art form. The photographer voices no opinion and saves their choice to point the camera at the scene. 

In truth, photography is subject to the same implicit and explicit biases that plague every other form of art and journalism, and has an inextricable relationship with power and exploitation. The legacy of street photography remains powerful: it has been tied to political activism for its ability to offer visibility and commentary on people and issues that society tends to marginalize, such as Gordon Parks’ focus on racial segregation during the era of the Civil Rights movement and David Wojnarowicz’s work during the AIDS epidemic.

However, there hardly seems anything daring or political about an average person’s picture gallery today. Writer and critic Susan Sontag purported that most people do not practice photography as an art form, but rather “a social rite,” and she was writing in the time before cell phones existed. If an art form is practiced by the masses, can it still be considered art? Is our everyday photography a meaningless gesture, as banal as small talk? I don’t believe so.

Expansive parking lots, corporate office buildings, anti-loitering laws — the modern city does not belong to us. As the separation between work and leisure becomes increasingly narrow, social architecture like parks and libraries dwindle and life becomes increasingly fast-paced, the sidewalk is no longer a place to linger. 

It might be time, then, to take a leaf out of the flâneur’s book. We must learn to wander with no purpose, on purpose. The flâneur is a character found in a tradition of writers and artists who considered their urban wanderings to be consequential enough to warrant a name. 

Working on one of her novels, author Virginia Woolf wrote in a 1930 letter that she could only find inspiration if she was “perpetually stimulated,” a state of being she found only by “plung[ing] into London, between tea and dinner, and walk[ing] and walk[ing], reviving [her] fires, in the city.”

Most of us can admit to the feeling of being perpetually stimulated – except we find our diversions through social media and the internet, where the wonders of having access to the thoughts and opinions of millions of people every second of every day can get, well, a little much. But what if this isn’t merely a symptom of the technological age? We are simple creatures, searching for beauty and narrative everywhere we look. In Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s words, we are “eternal tourists of ourselves; there is no landscape but what we are.”

Perhaps the camera is humanity’s most narcissistic invention. Or perhaps it is our most honest revelation, an endless love letter to the world. Everytime you are taken aback by the brilliance of the sunset on your way home, every graffiti caricature that makes you smile, the cat perched comfortably on a windowsill — it is a reminder of the physical world you are a part of.  

Taking a picture requires you to stop, look closer, experiment with angles. For a fraction of a second, you take responsibility for a piece of the city that is not yours. It is a declaration of belonging, and therefore a welcome inconvenience. 

As corporations encourage us to retreat into the blemish-less perfection of the digital world and real-life connections become harder to maintain, pictures are an ode to the imperfection of the everyday. Perhaps this is what Sontag means when she writes that “to collect photographs is to collect the world.” 

Every photograph may not be art, and it may be near-identical to the thousands of pictures you could find online, but it represents what you captured. Your pictures don’t need to be posted or published. They are simply a souvenir of having lived.