Talking with photographer Pete Millson recently reminded me of a routine by the late Canadian comedian Norm Macdonald. In his show he discusses how he might be remembered after his death. He said we don’t remember people as a series of moving pictures but as still images. When we attend a funeral or memorial service, we see photographs from that person’s life; perhaps on rare occasions there is some film at a gathering afterwards, but in most cases it is still images. Before the advent of photography, those who could afford it had an artist paint a portrait. Today, we are mostly memorialised through photographs. I found myself trying to remember lost friends this week while listening to Andrew O’Hagan’s podcast about friendship. He is coming to this year’s Bridport Literary Festival to talk about his new book On Friendship. O’Hagan discusses the moment in our youth when we first make friends and how different a friend can become compared to family. Family, he says, is often very involved, dark, personal, and historical. In contrast, he likens early friendships to a ‘glass of cool water after a fever.’ It turned out that trying to picture my lost friends, I could indeed only see still images—some from funeral service cards and some from blurred memories—but always still images, never moving. I wonder whether this will change with the advent of social media, especially that described by Simon Hart on page 40 as a ‘toxic environment’. Will the generations who grew up laughing at the antics of friends posted on YouTube videos or social media be different? Will memories of their friends burst out of the screen like action movie characters? Or is it possible that in a world riddled with misinformation, fake images, and now fake videos, they may struggle to have anything real to look back on?
