Not long ago, my husband and I spent a few days in Mexico City. Walking down Amsterdam Avenue, I felt the urge to snap a selfie, because that’s what you do, right? We leaned in close as I stretched out my arm and clicked a few frames on my iPhone 6S. I uploaded the best shot to Facebook, where it drew a flurry of thumbs-up and heart emojis. It took about three minutes.

When my mother was my age, she might have recorded that moment with a Polaroid, tucked the photo into her purse, and shared it with friends when she got home. And my grandmother? She’d have used her bulky Rolleiflex, taken the film to the drugstore, and pasted the print into a scrapbook days or weeks later.

What’s interesting here is not the cameras, but the increasing speed and ease with which they create photographs. From the moment the first photograph was taken in 1826 until the iPhone arrived on June 29, 2007, photography took time. By its nature, it recorded history. It said, “I was here.”

Laura Mallonee

The smartphone and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram made photography instantaneous. Suddenly people could take a photo anywhere in the world, edit it with a click and swipe, and send it or share it. The world uploads some 1.8 billion photos each day. Some are brilliant. Most are … not. Yet they all say the same thing: "I am here."

Now your feeds teem with photos of coffee and cats, sunsets and selfies, and other snap-judgment moments destined to die on old hard drives or languish in the cloud. And yet all those seemingly mundane images say more about us than any that came before. In an era when Snapchat and Instagram Stories lets an impulse become a photo, photography does more than communicate. It reflects the id. It says, "I am."

“In the past, people used to feel or think that there is one identity I am born with and take with me throughout my life,” says Daniel Rubinstein, a philosopher at Central St. Martins College. “The identity we now construct is very impermanent and fleeting and pliable. It’s not like I took one selfie and this is me and this is it. In half an hour I will take another, and another, and another … The selfie is not a reflection of me, it is the way by which my own self is coming into being.”

I Was Here

Nicéphore Niépce needed eight hours to make a single fuzzy exposure of his backyard in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, using a camera obscura. By the late 1800s, people in their Sunday best held perfectly still for several minutes as professionals with wood and brass plate cameras made their portrait on glass panes.

Eastman Kodak democratized photography in 1900 with the Brownie, a cheap cardboard and leather film camera that snap-happy tourists toted on road trips and beach vacations. Anyone could take a photo, send the film away to a lab, and get a photo a few days or weeks later.

And so it went for almost 100 years with the advent of 35mm film, the Instamatic and so on. But even as cameras became cheaper and easier to use, they still left you waiting for someone to develop the film and print the images. Polaroid eliminated that with the instant camera, but for most people, cameras remained something to pull out for birthdays, vacations, and weddings. Photography allowed them to share a memory, to say, “I was here.”

“With only 24 or 36 exposures, people were less likely to just photograph anything just so they could show it to someone else,” says Michelle Henning, a cultural historian and photographer at London School of Film, Media and Design.