It's Photography!

The act of taking photos is a pretty broad category, utilized by a broad spectrum of people, from self-important hipsters to kids who've had too much to drink, and everyone in between. People, cats, porn, people, buildings, lakes, mountains, textures, pretty much everything can be captured with a photograph. But I believe it is probably the single biggest technology of the second millennium, even greater than the flush toilet or the steam engine (though they are admittedly also very high on the list). In many ways, it's a crude form of time travel, allowing you to see certain things the way they used to be (and times you'll never experience), in some ways, it allowed a capture of certain scenes that were previously off-limits. Prior to photography, were there any detailed portraits of the poor, at all?

Because of the speedy, high-capacity digital cameras today, someone could get hundreds of photos to a trip (if not thousands). While it's a bore to sit through them all, isn't it objectively good that they could show you a good portion of what it was like? Back in 1998, I only had one disposable camera to take on my Washington D.C. trip. If I knew better (and knowing what I'd like to see now), I should've taken scads of pictures. My own current photo history includes photos I'm glad I took, and photos I'm kicking myself for never taking. Because I don't have everything documented, I'm often forced to borrow pictures for my better known blog, Brazos Buildings & Businesses. While I missed seeing that last AppleTree in operation, I got to see Dulie Bell (at least the exterior) one last time, as well as G. Rollie, and numerous others (my apologies if you don't know what those refer to).

Just saying something to an underappreciated technology, I guess.