Cell phones evolve faster than you can say Jack Robinson, and I’ve lost track of my sequence of devices. First was a flip phone for making calls when away from home, with the domino effect being the demise of pay phones. Then I learned how to text and could message someone at odd hours without worry. And almost immediately – maybe even before I figured out texting – technology introduced my favorite phone function ever – the camera! Suddenly SLRs were superfluous and rolls of film went the way of the dinosaurs.

Taking photographs is both a creative outlet and a memory preserver for me. My father was an amateur photographer who learned darkroom skills in World War II, shooting and developing images of enemy ordnance which was part of his assignment as a bomb disposal officer. Back home he documented his growing family and printed our annual photo Christmas cards, setting up his temporary darkroom in the bathroom. I caught the bug, took a class during college, and when I began making art photos and shooting weddings, Daddy built me a darkroom of my own.

But that was last century, and the birth of digital photography in the 2000’s meant darkrooms faded out like pay phones. From early digital cameras to the now-ubiquitous phone camera, the advances in quality and features has been mind-blowing. I love having a super shooter always at hand in my pocket or purse, and only regret that I don’t organize my prints into physical albums like I did last century. Of course these days my shots zap instantaneously from phone to Google, where I still put them into digital albums which I can share in real time.

Progress at warp speed can be disorienting for us “Analoggers” born in the last century. In the 1980 sci-fi film “Death Watch”, Harvey Keitel had cameras implanted in his eyes to surreptitiously record a stranger (Romy Schneider) who had a terminal illness in a future where there was no longer any death by disease. His video of her decline went viral (and we hadn’t even coined that term in 1980!) on reality TV, foreshadowing our present day mediascape. 

Smartphones with internet connectivity, together with their time-wasting offspring Social Media, have changed the world, and often not in a positive way. I was born smack in the middle of the 20th century, and am still rolling along almost a quarter century into the 2000s. “Turn of the Century” terminology just helps us chunk time into segments we can label, and I must confess I love the convenience provided by modern progress. Me and my phone camera keep documenting and sharing, and maybe someday someone will download my memories and wonder at how far they’ve come since the “old days”!