Watching the Manatees, Aquarium, Epcot Center. There is a lot of magic at Disney World, a lot of challenge and preparation. We can no longer just walk around and choose the things we want to see, there is an elaborate system of “fastpasses” and reservations as the parks break off into a two-tiered system: people with reservations on rides and at restaurants, people without. You either get into the fastpass line or you are a standby person. I bet every ride will require a reservation in the near future, that system is already being put into place. No more spontaneity, feels like. Still, plenty to see and do.
At Epcot in Disney World, you can see more clearly than anywhere the death of photography and it’s very democratic rebirth. Photography was once considered a science, then an art. It is now a revolution in images, everyone is taking photos of everything, everyone has a cell phone camera, video camera, or digital camera. There is nothing of beauty or movement, and many things with neither, but all are now recorded and stories.
The people who used to be photographers charge to take pictures of the people with the cameras, they stand in front of every symbolic image and take photos of the people with the cameras who pause to have their own images recorded. Nothing need be remembered, every image in the world is now shared.
For me, a creative challenge. What can I possibly photograph at Disney World that everyone has not seen million times. I try and focus on images,scenes, feelings, to capture a moment in time and space. I wonder what it means that we no longer need to remember anything or consider it, we can look at it later, for free and as often as we want.
Once upon a time, a photograph was a complex thing involving light and equipment and it cost a lot of money and time to produce an image that could be saved. It is miraculous and democratic that everyone can be a photographer now, and their tiny cameras are every bit as good as mine. Is there any art to photography any more? I don’t know, I can’t say, I’m too close to it. When anyone can do it, does it still have special meaning? I think so, but I’m not sure why yet. The people at Disney are smart, every few feet in front of every fountain or iconic symbol are photographers waiting at special photo stations, they take pictures of people who have signed up and beam them to a printing station where they can be printed or transmitted digitally.
I was watching them all day, two told me they used to be professional photographers but the digital revolution took their work away, they now take photos of people taking photos.
Walt Disney was a mystic, he believed in symbols and icons. He conceived of the Cinderella Castle – modeled after a castle in Europe – as the heart of Disney, along with the mouse. Walking through the Magic Kingdom, watching the sun set over the castle, it seemed a wise choice to me. All roads in the kingdom lead to the castle.
Walt Disney was a complex man, sometimes autocratic, misogynist and difficult, sometimes idealistic, emotional. He had a hard childhood, his father drove him hard and he worked almost from the time he could walk, but the child in him never quite grew up, and the new gifts of technology – heat, telephones, running water – imbued a lifelong idealism in him that was never quashed by the hard realities of life.
“It’s A Small, Small, World,” the astonishingly, colorful, complex yet simple ride and exhibit he created for the birth of the United Nations and then showcased at the World’s Fair In Flushing, New New York. After the fair, he moved it to Disney World, it is popular still. The exhibit evoked his firm belief that the world was coming together, a new era of peace and co-operation had dawned out of the ashes of World War II. This view is also reflected in EPCOT Center, where his dream of a world linked together in peace and commerce is still quite visible in his World Showcase Lagoon.
If we can’t yet live together in harmony, we can at least eat and shop together.
Disney’s idealistic vision has not yet happened, clearly, but although it does not often seem that way, the world is in many ways a much safer and more connected place than ever. The dream still lives.
Children intuitively love “It’s A Small, Small, World,” it is built on a scale for them and is magical, thousands of moving parts. The digital age makes it look a bit funky and outmoded, but it still touches a certain kind of person, the vision of a peaceful world still speaks to people who are open to it.
Like many geniuses who leave their mark on the world – Disney and Jobs often come to mind – Walt Disney was difficult, but he never lost faith in his humanistic vision of the world. He might have been the world’s first Utopian Capitalist, but “It’s A Small, Small, World,” a living argument that humans are connected to one another at the core, despite their differences, it a message of hope, it still resonates.
