I was looking through my phone gallery recently, searching for a shitpost material, when a thought occurred to me.
I have a nephew who’s now a few years old. And among the things I can pull up on my phone are videos of him being bathed by his grandmother when he was barely a month old, him dancing to a song at around a year old, crying during bath time and doing all sorts of things babies do before they become sufficiently coordinated to do much else.
Whenever he starts moving wildly around me, I effortlessly pull out my phone and show him his younger self being bathed. He isn’t particularly fond of that one. At some point, he even tried denying it was him. “It doesn’t look like me!” Smart kid yunno.
But beyond the mirth, there’s something quite remarkable about it. I can pull up his infancy on demand. He can’t remember any of it, but one day he’ll be able to look at himself at an age when he could barely hold his head properly. He’ll have access to fragments of a life he was too young to remember living.
It got me thinking about how fortunate children growing up today might be in this regard.
For many of us who grew up before smartphones became commonplace, most of the childhood photographs we have access to are often tied to particular occasions: birthdays, naming ceremonies, weddings, school events and family portraits. Important moments, certainly, but not necessarily a continuous record of growing up.
Of course, this wasn’t everybody’s experience. Some children were privileged enough to have had photographers, home videos and extensive family albums documenting their early years long before smartphones became common. But the accessibility of smartphones, mobile cameras and the habit of recording everyday life have expanded over time, even if access has never been evenly distributed.
Today, your big cousin doesn’t need to hire a photographer to capture you doing something completely unremarkable at a few months old. Someone can simply reach for their phone and document those otherwise unremarkable moments.
And perhaps the most interesting part is that these recordings aren’t necessarily being made at the request of the people appearing in them. My nephew isn’t asking to see videos of himself being bathed. He’s not even aware that somebody is making a record of his early life. People like me who record him are, in a sense, leaving something for a person he hasn’t become yet.
We record for a future that hasn’t arrived.
The child being bathed today might be the same person looking through those videos twenty years from now, trying to understand what he was like before he could form memories of his own. The people making the recordings may not know exactly what they’ll mean to him. We just think the moment is worth keeping.
And that’s where this thought begins to stretch beyond childhood.
From Personal Memories to Cultural Memory
The same accessibility that allows us to document a child’s ordinary moments also changes what we can preserve of the world around us, culturally.
Consider the things we create, the people who make them and the processes that bring them into existence.
A fashion designer can document a garment from its first sketch to completion. A craftsperson can record techniques and processes that might otherwise remain undocumented outside the workshop.
The same phone that allows me to effortlessly capture my nephew’s bath can capture a tailor mid-stitch, a musician working through a rough arrangement or a fashion designer documenting the development of a collection.
This changes not just how much we document, but what we consider worth documenting in the first place. We are no longer limited to preserving the finished work or the exhibition opening.
The significance of documenting something, however, isn’t always apparent in the moment. Some recordings only reveal their value when we return to them years later, with the benefit of hindsight.
Before the Mythology Forms
A good example of the value of this kind of documentation is jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, the documentary series following Kanye West’s journey over two decades. Beyond the albums, awards, fame and public persona, the documentary offers something arguably more revealing: footage of the person before much of the mythology surrounding him had taken shape.
You see the early ambitions, the hunger, the frustrations, the studio sessions, the people around him and the work involved in trying to establish himself. You encounter moments that probably didn’t feel particularly historic when they were being recorded.
We have our own versions of these records, even if they don’t always take the form of documentary footage.
Think about the old tweets of artists like Wizkid and Burna Boy. Long before some of their ambitions became achievements, they had already put parts of those ambitions into words. Their old Twitter timelines, alongside lyrics from their earlier music, offer fragments of the futures they imagined for themselves.
Years later, those fragments can be revisited with a different understanding. What might once have looked like an ambitious tweet or a line in an old song can become part of the record of how an artist imagined their own future.
But these are still fragments. We have glimpses of what these artists hoped to become, without necessarily having access to the conversations, studio sessions, creative disagreements and ordinary moments surrounding those ambitions.
A more extensive visual record could have preserved those circumstances, too. Imagine having that kind of material for more African artists, filmmakers, designers, photographers and cultural movements: not just polished retrospective documentaries assembled years later, but years of everyday documentation that already exist because someone thought to keep recording.
More Than Memories: Preserving Knowledge
There’s another value to documenting the creative process that goes beyond personal or cultural history: knowledge preservation.
A recording of a craftsperson at work, for instance, can preserve more than the image of a finished object. It might capture the precise movement of their hands, the sequence of steps, the tools they use and the small adjustments that are difficult to explain in writing.
The finished product tells us what was made. The process can teach us how it was made.
And there is an interesting question here, particularly as behind-the-scenes content becomes an increasingly familiar part of creative work: are artists documenting their processes primarily to preserve them, or has being visible online become another expectation of being a creator?
The two aren’t mutually exclusive. A studio video might be promotional content today and a valuable historical record years from now. But the motivations behind recording something and the value it eventually holds aren’t always the same. Not everything posted online is intended to be preserved, and not everything worth preserving is made for an audience.
Having a Camera Isn’t the Same as Having an Archive
The ability to record something doesn’t automatically mean we’ve preserved it.
Our phones are full of photographs and videos. Some are backed up, some are scattered across social media apps, others have probably been lost when an old device stopped working or went missing. A recording can exist without ever becoming something we can find, understand or access again.
There’s a difference between documentation and archiving.
Documentation is the act of recording something. Archiving involves preserving, organising and providing enough context for that material to remain useful over time.
Without those things, even a substantial collection of recordings can become difficult to navigate or eventually disappear. Access remains uneven, too. Not everyone has a device capable of recording good footage, sufficient storage, reliable internet access or a platform on which to preserve and share their work. Not every artist or cultural community has the institutional support to maintain an archive. Some people are documenting extensively, while others are still struggling to get their work seen in the first place.
The camera has made recording more accessible. Preservation, nonetheless, is another responsibility entirely.
For the People Who Come After Us
Coming back to my nephew, he has no idea how much of his early life is already sitting in somebody else’s phone. He doesn’t know that he might one day be able to see his grandmother bathing him, watch himself struggle to crawl or encounter little versions of himself that exist only in the memories of the people who were there.
The kids don’t know how easy they have it. Neither, perhaps, do we, until we notice what is being saved that might otherwise have been lost.
The person behind the camera may not know the historical or educational value of what they’re capturing. Sometimes, they just think it’s a moment worth keeping. One day, somebody else might be grateful that they did.
We record for a future that hasn’t arrived. And while we cannot know exactly what that future will want to remember about us, we can make sure it has something to look back at.