Every day, I grieve for Instagram

Trigger warning: Violence, domestic abuse

Nineteen Eighty-Three. That is probably the first time I picked up a camera. I say ‘probably’ because I was born not long before that, and I can only assume that it took me a couple of years before I was able to crawl into my father’s brown and tan camera bag to explore the Canon A1 he purchased the week before I was born. He bought the camera to take photos of me, his first child. For someone who neither makes a living as a photographer nor takes all that many photos these days, I sure did write a lot of books about photography.

My first cell phone couldn’t just receive SMS… It could send them too! Yes, there was a whole generation of phones that could receive, but not send texts. They were essentially mobile phones with a pager attached.

A technologist at heart, I was an early adopter of mobile phones. In the summer of 1997, I had an Ericsson GH 388 that I had bought second-hand off a colleague who was a recently recovered drug user, so he could buy heroin with the money I had earned at my very first summer job. Yes, the same job where I met him: at the Salvation Army. He showed me the cotton ball with blood on it from where he had shot up, and I never quite figured out why that seemed like a good idea to him.

As a hormone-ravaged teenager with a particular love of the nude female form, I loved the smell of the boarding school’s darkroom chemicals as much as I hated the sting of its cost on my wallet, so when photography became digital, I was hooked. Finally — photography could move from carefully…