“She’s a phony. But she’s a real phony. Know what I mean, kid?”

Quote from the film ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’, describing Holly Golightly

Something that used to happen on that little Maldivian island was the fake wedding phenomenon.  I may be wrong but I’m making the assumption that this is a relatively new development driven by social media:  couples taking photos on the beach of their pretend wedding.  They wouldn’t actually get married there but would bring the whole shebang with them to make it look like such.  Full meringue-style wedding dresses, suits, flowers and sometimes an entourage.  All to pose on the beach for a fake wedding photo. 

            I’m relatively old and thankfully did most of my growing up before the advent of the likes of facebook, so this is a strange concept to me.  In ‘my day’ photos were taken to capture memories of events.  You know, important stuff actually happening in your life that you wanted to commit to film as a reminder of how that moment felt.  Those were the days when you used to have to get cartridges of film developed, which would take days or sometimes weeks.  Yes, young folk out there, no immediate gratification for us!  But the anticipation of getting those photos back added to the pleasure, waiting to see which ones had come out clearly, which ones were half obscured by a finger.  Hoping that moments which could never be repeated would be captured for all time on a precious piece of 6×4 shiny paper.  The possibility that those moments wouldn’t be properly recorded perhaps even making them more precious at the time:  we committed them to memory because we couldn’t rely on technology to do it for us (in the same way I can still remember my best friend’s phone number from 30 years ago, but have no clue what her current one is because technology remembers it for me).  More to the point, the focus was on the moment, not the recording of it.

            Don’t get me wrong, I think modern technology is a wondrous thing and I wouldn’t be without it (well, sometimes, I would).  But I can’t help feeling something has been lost, thrown out with our throw away culture.  That we can take 400 photos of an evening and see/delete/revise on the spot somehow diminishes the essence of it.  Simply holding up a recording device creates a barrier, a distance between us being in the experience of the moment by changing the focus.

            So where is the line between real and fake?  The fake wedding is a real fake wedding, after all, so I suppose those couples are capturing true memories of something:  ”Look, Darling, here’s a photo of that special day we pretended to get married on the beach …”

 

(photo in the public domain)