The iPhone changed our view of the world

Bilbao 2014.

When the iPhone was invented, it rotated the visual world by ninety degrees for most users. 

When people take photographs with their phones, I can guarantee, from observation, that they will take nearly all those pictures with their device held vertically. Every shot becomes a portrait photograph. Photographically, we have become monocular, even though our species and most animals have a binocular pair of eyes. This gives us a landscape context and the ability to measure depth. Whether to see danger more quickly, hunt food prey more efficiently, or take pictures that accurately reflect how we see the world. 

Everyone is a photographer now. However, a generation is growing up in a vertical photographic world, missing most of the picture. In fact, two-thirds of it — whenever a TV news programme uses a ‘bystander’ clip of photo or video, they almost always have to frame it with a blurred shot on either side, to fill the television screen space. Instagram and TikTok encourage a default vertical format. Probably a part of the ‘me’ ethos those platforms promote. 

As I write this in a little square in a town in Portugal, catching the remains of the autumn evening heat, there’s an accordionist busking. His attention hook is a tiny dog sitting atop his instrument, a poor thing that must have its brain scrambled by nonstop music. Or maybe it has become deaf from it all. There could be a dozen phones pointed at them at any time. All vertical. All ignore the context around the accordionist. When they show the photos to their friends back home, they won’t see the other stories around the scene.  The architecture. The street. The audience. 

I’ve been a photographer for over fifty years. In the early days, I used smelly chemicals and expensive treated paper to make my final prints, cropping each one on the enlarger to depict what I wanted as the final picture. When the digital era arrived, cameras were still designed to take photos as we see them with two eyes. Over decades of peering through viewfinders, I have made pictures worldwide as a journalist who illustrates his own stories. So, how would the Grand Canyon have looked as a portrait shot? Or a food market in Laos, where a stall-holder lifts your selected live fish from a bucket of water, slashes the head off and wraps the very fresh item for your dinner? Or the dazzling white distances to the horizon of the Salar del Uyuni salt pan in the Bolivian Andes? Or the exceptionally lonely atmosphere of a winter drive through the centre of Iceland? 

One of my favourites among all those photographic recollections, I took after mass on a Sunday morning in the old town in Bilbao, Spain. It’s of people congregated outside various tapas bars. There’s no one point of focus in that shot, but looking at the multiple sets of two, three or more people, all animated in their own groups, at least nine different stories are presented. Most would have been unseen in a vertical iPhone photograph. 

I’m not wedded to landscape. I'll crop to a portrait for an actual headshot of someone. I use squares when appropriate, perhaps for a couple who don’t need a larger background context. And if a more usual 4:3 picture ratio isn’t appropriate. But in social media publishing, blog links to Facebook, for instance, require widescreen photos, or heads can get chopped.

We live in a landscape world, and while we can photographically focus closely on parts of it, we don't know what to leave out if we don’t have the whole picture. Shoot the world as a Cyclops, the mythical one-eyed Greek monster, and you’re stuck with what you get.

So, next time, turn that iPhone sideways, and leave yourself with all the options. 

Don't spoil your vote!

An actual campaign has been launched to encourage people to spoil their votes in the upcoming presidential election. There’s also a fair bit of similar commentary spouting on social media. A recent opinion poll suggests that about 6 per cent of people plan to deliberately spoil their votes. Which is about 4.5 times more than the actual level of spoiled votes in the 2018 election. Or, in real numbers, some 90,000 people taking the time to deliberately do something negative.

I really don’t get that. If there’s no candidate that you want to vote for on the ballot, just don’t bother going to the polls. Don’t waste your own time, and the time of the hard-working tellers at the count centres, who have to sort your bit of useless paper from the ones that do make a difference. 

You might say you’re exercising your democratic right to protest that there’s nobody on the ballot who reflects your views. But have you thought that you’re just being cranky? That you’re throwing your toys out of the playpen because you’re in a sulk?

OK, so you don’t have Maria Steen, or Gareth Sheridan on the ballot, or any of the others who didn’t make it through the nomination process. Or you might vote for Jim Gavin, whose name IS there, even though you know he backed out of the race after stumbling at the second debate fence. And you know that’s another wasted effort.

The vote that we all enjoy today is a democratic one. It was hard fought for. It’s valuable because everyone has it. That wasn’t always the case. A vote in Ireland was based on religion, with Catholics disenfranchised, until 1793. Then it was only on the basis of property ownership until 1918. With the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922, the franchise was opened to all men and women citizens of the state, and it’s now 53 years since the voting age here was lowered to 18.

Sometimes I think we don’t appreciate it. Turnout in the 2018 presidential election was less than 44 per cent, the lowest ever. Unlike, for example, Australia, voting here is not mandatory. What we have easy in our generation maybe we don’t value.

Use it or lose it, isn’t that what they say about life and skills? If we don’t use our vote, we could lose our democracy. If that sounds extreme, look at what’s happening across the Atlantic. In just half a year since the present incumbent of the USA’s highest office took up residence, what has been the flagship of modern democracy is being steered directly towards the rocks of autocracy. The really scary part is how easily the instruments of state — justice, law enforcement and defence — can be turned on a country’s own citizens. All made possible on a winner’s margin of less than 1 percent of the eligible turnout. More than a third of those eligible to vote in that election didn’t do so. And there’s a strong push from the current administration to make it more difficult for those groups who might oppose them to be able to vote next time around.

It couldn’t happen here. Could it? Well, have a think about it if you’re one of those considering the deliberate spoiling of your vote next week. What we take for granted in this safe, mostly comfortable, and in many other ways fortunate country of ours, may be much more fragile than you think. 

The day trip

“Hi,” the man said as he opened the passenger door and peered in.

“Hi,” I replied. “Where you headed?”

Back in the mid-1970s, people still hitched in Ireland. And those of us fortunate to be in cars frequently gave people lifts. For both parties it was something of a gamble. Of easy conversation, or not. Of possible personality clashes. Of committing to a distance or destination together that might prove to have been a mistake in as little as a minute or two into the drive. Of finding truth in the urban myths of either the hitcher or the driver turning out to be unsavoury or even dangerous. The sad realities of that, which still reverberate today in cases of missing people last seen trying for lifts, hadn’t yet arrived in Ireland …

Most of my time driving then, usually when alone, I did pick up people. Particularly on my way out from Dublin to my home in mid-Kildare. Sometimes I might detour a little, to get them to Newbridge, for instance, when my own drive would have been directly to Kilcullen through Naas. The extra miles and time were no big deal to me, and yet often could make a significant difference to my stranger passenger. Sometimes there was interesting conversation, other journeys were made in silent listening to the car radio. In a decade of motoring before Ireland gradually joined the league of dangerous places for hitching, I had no bad encounters with people I gave lifts to.

The mid-1970s were before our motorways. The traffic lights at Newlands Cross on the outskirts of the city was a favourite spot for people seeking a lift, with cars regularly moving slowly off on the green. That facilitated both hitcher and driver with time to seek or decide. A stop there for down-country buses was a last-recourse option for those who failed to get a ride.

One morning, I don’t remember why I had been in the city so early, the lights stopped me at Newlands around ten-thirty. Waiting for the green, I saw a couple standing at the bus stop, both with backpacks, a duffel bag at the man’s feet. To me, just passed from my twenties, they looked not quite elderly, maybe my parents’ age. The man’s thumb was tentatively out as the lights changed and the traffic moved off. I decided, pulled over and waited.

After those introductory ‘Hi’s, the woman had caught up and also bent down to look in. She smiled, a pleasant, motherly kind of woman. “We missed our coach,” she said. “We’ll go as far as you can take us, where we can maybe get a bus onwards, towards Limerick?” The accent was north American.

I nodded. “Sure. I can take you to Newbridge. It’ll get you on your road. There are several Limerick buses through there.”

“Thank you,” the man said, his accent similar to hers. “I’ll put the bags in the trunk, if that’s OK?”

“Sure. I’ll come and open it.”

A few minutes later, the bags stowed, the man was in the back seat and his wife, as she turned out to be, sitting up front. We were on our way down the N7, an easy drive as far as Naas, the road had been dual carriageway since 1968. We quickly got through the basics, the ‘thanks for picking us up’, exchanged names. Alice and Tom. They were Canadian. Their first time in Ireland. Somehow, it wasn’t really clear why, they had missed the connection in the city to their group heading out on a tour of the south and west of Ireland. Someone had told them, ‘take a city bus to Newlands Cross, you’ll get a lift from there’.

They were nice people. I don’t remember now what they did, but my recollection is that they were probably within horizon’s view of retirement. Like most north Americans I'd met, they were easy, open people. Happy to talk, not yet sure of the protocols when hitching a ride in Ireland. We got on well. They shared happy anticipation of their tour, if they managed to catch up with it. They had no family connections to Ireland.

By the time we reached Newbridge I had made a decision. It was my weekend off in the family pub business where I worked. I knew where their tour was staying that night, in Killarney. Catching up with it by the national bus service was not a likely possibility. “Stay there a moment,” I said as I pulled in behind the bus stop. “I just want to make a phone call.” The phone box — no mobile phones in those days — was conveniently nearby. My wife wasn’t surprised. She was by now used to my habit of bringing people further than needed. "Your strays," she called them. At least this time I wasn’t also bringing them home for lunch. 

“We’ll keep going,” I said when I got back in the car. “I’m not working today, and I like to drive.” My car at the time was a red Rover 2200 TC, and I loved driving it. Loved cars. Which, a whole other story, was probably part of how I became much later in my life a motoring and travel journalist. But for this day, I was driver to a couple of visitors to Ireland whom in a very short space of time I had come to like. Also, working in what is now known as the hospitality business, I had always been conscious of fulfilling our Irish reputation of ‘cead mile failte’, a hundred thousand welcomes. Truth, though — a spin to Kerry was a great excuse for a day out in the car.

But we took the long way. We stopped in Kildare to look at the round tower and cathedral, in a place of spirituality going back to the time of St Brigid. We drove through the pretty town of Abbeyleix, the oldest planned estate town in Ireland. We stopped at the Rock of Cashel, where the King of Munster was reputed to have been converted to Christianity by St Patrick. We paused at several other places on the way that were probably on the route of many a tourist coach. Some of them I knew from my childhood, when driving with my Dad, a much-thumbed hardback Road Book of Ireland on my lap. Published in the mid-1950s by the Automobile Association, its almost 300 pages included thumbnail write ups of virtually every village and town in the country, compiled by Michael Morris, also known as Lord Killanin. In a number of these places I also recalled owners of bars, as my Dad, a prominent publican, had friends in the same business, it seemed in every town in Ireland. 

All that made it a very slow trip to Killarney, and it was dark when I helped Alice and Tom with their luggage up the steps of their hotel. The rest of their tour group were probably in the middle of their evening meal. “Stay the night,” Alice urged me. “We’ll pay for it. It's the least we can do.” I declined. It was time for them to join their own group, and for the rest of their holiday to find out with a real tour guide the Ireland that they had come to experience. We hugged, and I drove home.

For many years after that, around the anniversary of their trip to Ireland, there was a postcard from Canada signed by Alice and Tom. Just to say they were thinking of the day they had spent with me. After some years, the card only had Alice’s name.

Eventually the card didn’t come at all. But, though details are lost in the mists of overcrowded memory and the passage of too many decades, that day remains one of my fondest. In showing that couple some of the places on our journey, I had relived many of my own early years on the road with my Dad. They often were slow and staggered trips too.

I had done Alice and Tom a favour, sure. But I had got at least as much in return.