It's Not Over Til It's Over

Every year we designate time to honor the many arts, people, and social constructs that make our world grand. May has been designated as National Photography Month. Throughout the course of this month, The Axis of Stevil has been distributing disposable cameras and pinhole light boxes to any member wishing to take a moment this May and snap a few pictures.

Be it digital, 35mm, or large format, photographs have the power to capture an instant of time and preserve it almost indefinitely. Over the course of the years, since the medium’s inception in 1826 when Joseph Niépce captured his assistant Steve Plasémy’s image on a polished pewter plate, millions of people have captured their own moments of time. Shared photos have connected the world and shown us the destruction and beauty that can be found anywhere.

In 1948, Slymen Fairfax published a paper 'Photographic Time and the Danger That Faces Us.' The 134-page report detailed Fairfax’s deep fear towards having his, or any picture taken. He speculated that photographs really were bits of quantum reality captured onto celluloid and that "A society continually stripping the universe of quantum energy with their Pentaxs would weaken the bonds of reality to a breaking point within twenty-five years". Slymen continued to theorize that rampant photography would also make time travel impossibly dangerous.

"Our modern time-traveling infantry will face great peril when traveling to the current era. The chances are great that these serving men could arrive at a time that has already been collected leaving them stranded in an unknown void of reality"

Fairfax's paper caused massive hysteria and a wave of irrational thinking, which climaxed with a hearing to forever outlaw photography within the United States. Thankfully, sanity triumphed when Bull Moose Senator, Steve Lindsay spoke out against the bombastic claims spewed by Fairfax. Assembling the greatest minds of the time in the senate chambers, Lindsay formed the ‘Council of Wisdom'. The CW took Fairfax’s paper point-by-point and disproved all of his assertions, swaying the senate to vote down the measure to ban photography. The council’s message was recorded and broadcasted on the Dumont Television network quelling panicked citizens.

Seeing their error, they declared in a joint session of Congress that the month of May forever be National Photography Month. Since then, over 23,000,000,000,000 (twenty-three trillion) photos have been taken in America alone.