I generally take about 15 photos a day. This means 5475 photos per year, an incredible amount of images. I would describe these photos as fast and practical, mainly taken with my mobile phone. Most of them directly sent, posted or deleted.

Something seems to be changing in the way these images are valued. Printing photos is becoming rare. Where we used to excitedly develop an analogue photo album, we now would rather take 3 extra shots, just to be sure. Where photos used to be inserted into physical photo albums, nowadays they seem to be placed on Instagram or sent via Snapchat. Photos can be “liked” and quickly scrolled through. Slideshow evenings have been replaced with Facebook posts and photo glue for hashtags. In earlier days, photos were taken with a lot of focus and patience and now they tend to be taken with a quick action without too much thought. A lot of photos will immediately be deleted. And the ones which stay usually end up in heavy, digital folders.

In addition, to the amount of images and our access to them, the function of photographs also seems to change. Locations are determined on the basis of a photo and criminals are caught by a proving photograph of an accidental passer-by. It is clear that since the advent of new technologies, such as digital photography and telephone cameras, we associate with photos differently than before. In a way there seems to be a need to confirm the reality by a captured photo.

To what extent do contemporary photographs define our existence? To investigate this, I place my personal photos outside their contemporary context for a period of one year.