I picked up my first Polaroid camera in San Francisco, chosen from a large drawer of identical and redundant items in the back of an ageing camera shop. My most recent version is a Leica Sofort, a small format (and very stylish) version with a glass lens. But whilst one is old and the other new, they both serve the same function: to take a snapshot.
This is a vernacular technology, both magical but also mundane. Polaroids are party cameras - family gathering cameras - prom night cameras. They are not formally posed affairs, but rather something that quickly captures a moment for equally speedy consumption, just a few minutes later.
The truth that emerges from the film, as we huddle around it (or on cold winter days, stick it in an inside pocket until it warms up enough to develop) is a grounded one. You cannot adjust it after the event (without much fuss and trickery) - and that moment is now gone.
The notion of a snapshot is one that we can apply to Culture, and our experience of it. Not a broad truth, but a momentary one. Not a generalisable image, but a very personal one. And not a permanent image, but a transient one.
The picture we take in the morning will differ from the one this afternoon.
And we should remember that there is no central truth: these images are not snapshots of a static object. They are the movement of the party, the swirl of the conversation, and the will of the crowd.
Culture is a negotiated phenomena, a matter of story and belief, and an individual experience within a social context.
Hence why Organisational attempts to own, define, shape, or change culture may struggle, if they fail to recognise that it is, itself, fluid and constructed within an between us, not so much upon us.
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