Just like shag carpet in the 70’s, big permed hair in the 80’s, and boy bands in the 90’s, there’s no doubt in our mind that square-cropped photos will be a distinct marker of our current time, something we’ll look back on and laugh at ourselves about.
And yet, we know that we won’t even have the slightest desire to go back and change it — because it’s so engrained in our current culture, such a part of our everyday life, and something that’s so fun to be part of. No matter what future generations say about how silly it was that we photographed everything from our food to our friends (and sometimes our friends holding food), we’ll be glad we did it, because we’ll have so many memories to show for it.
Earlier this month, we shared the memory books that we create every year mostly from iPhone photos cropped for Instagram, so that we can go back every year and re-live everything from the biggest highlights, like a new niece or nephew being born or some exciting business success, all the way to smaller, seemingly more routine aspects of our life that actually have an incredible impact and shape who we are and the year we had, like family get-togethers, dinners with close friends, and snuggle sessions with our kittens.
When we’re old and gray, we have this romantic idea that these square-cropped iPhone photos will tell a more complete story of our life than almost anything else, because they’ll reflect the people and things we cared most about in the moments we cared about them. It won’t matter that they’re grainy or filtered or shadowy, because they’ll remind us of who we were, where we’d been, and who we’d loved.
Plus, they’ll have hashtags, and we’ll get to explain to our grandkids what #firstworldproblems are and why we’re #sorrywe’renotsorry that they don’t understand that phones used to be something you held in your hand, not just implanted into your head, and photos were something you actually had to click a button on a device to produce, not just blink your eyes.
If you’re on Instagram, we’d love for you to follow us at @amy_demos and @jordan_demos and keep up with this crazy adventure together that we call life.