Undoing photography...

All the photographs ever taken have collectively taken something from the smooth operation of the universe: Light! We know the old saw about photographs stealing souls, but I'd like to add a more scientific impact analysis to our collective fear heap.

Just as a few carbon-spewing cars and factories seemed harmless to our global environment in the early 20th Century, what harm could the harvesting of light and its entrapment in silver particles on paper possibly bring about? Well, like all technologies that grow on an exponential curve, the potential for massive and unintended side effects is staggering.

Billions upon billions of photos, analog and digital alike, have carelessly interrupted the intergalactic path of untold numbers of light waves, effectively freezing them in a highly unnatural state for our gawking pleasure. And because we've essentially taken these light waves out of cosmic play, we're swiftly nearing a point where the interrupted flow of light throughout the universe is creating unprecedented light blights in both near and far flung corners of the cosmos.

What's to be done? Even if we were to entirely stop taking pictures at this moment, the damage is already well underway.

What we need to do is start systematically un-taking all the pictures that have ever been taken. This painstaking process involves first carefully re-creating the composition of each photograph and using as many actual elements as can be found. Then you'll need an nuclear powered anti-camera to produce matching lightwaves that can be focused back into the lightmosphere. Of course many of these new light grafts won't take, they'll be rejected by existing light waves for reasons we'll never fully understand. But still we must try. It's the only hope we have of partially restoring the light.

I don't want to sound the alarm too much here, but hey, people, we need to start mass developing and disseminating these anti-cameras to our children so that they can begin to undo the damage we've unleashed. As a model, I've included the above photograph as a sample re-creation that is close enough to the original to possibly, under optimal conditions, reinsert the lost light back into the compromised universal light system. Of course the anti-photo version would leave no visual trace.

Let's get un-snapping!

(from the "Back to the Future" series by Irina Werning)