old fashioned

Had some interesting discussions with students this week. One centred around the use of black and white images. The students had turned their images into monochrome to get an ‘oldy worldy’ feel. Bloody hell! It doesn’t seem that long ago we were busy in our darkrooms making these images and it seemed normal at the time. I bought my first digital camera in 2000, 13 years later black and white images are seen as old fashioned, How quickly things change. I wondered how quickly things go from being modern to out-of-date.

We talked about mobile phones and I asked my group about what they thought about phones that were a year  or more old and whether they thought they were old fashioned. I also asked them to consider whether the phones had changed or if the way they looked at the world had altered.

It threw up some interesting questions. What makes a thing new and modern one day, old fashioned and out of date the next? What is the mechanism for the way our views change? I also realised how quickly things do change. What seemed a recent development (digital cameras) was for most of my group all they knew. As I was buying my first digital camera most of my group were learning how to read and write.

Perhaps its also part of just growing old.