I have been disputing a parking ticket with a local council since November 2024. The case is finally getting juicy. I will be self- representing at a tribunal, which fills me with an enormous sense of pride. I’m not doing this for myself, I’m doing this for the fined, the forgotten and the falsely accused everywhere. I’m doing this for you, dear reader. And because I’m not paying £180.
I could give you the whole back story, but the facts are simple: I parked, tried to pay, but technology failed me. There were no ticket machines and the app broke at a critical moment. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to photograph and screenshot all of it.
I think I have a good chance in court. A blurry picture of a street corner, timestamped exactly two minutes before the ticket was issued, is proof I was in the area trying my honest best, that I was not the reckless abandoner of vehicles they have taken me for.
I’ve been thinking about pictures a lot this week. Namely, the thousands of images we take on our phones that have been accumulating for years.
At the Apple conference in June, they unveiled the new AI-enhanced Siri that can cross-reference between your photos, messages and emails, and make sense of what it finds. You could ask it to ‘find memories with Mum’, for instance, or to archive photos of an ex. The software was rolled out in the UK this month – and will come ready-installed in the new iPhone Duo, Apple’s £2,000 flip phone launching in October. It arrives at a time of such moral panic about our phones that when former PM Keir Starmer announced age restrictions on social media, it was met with the kind of unanimous approval he didn’t manage on anything else. Phones are not popular these days, but if we all wake up tomorrow and they are gone, I suspect we would mourn the loss of our photographs more than anything else.
On my own iPhone 17 Pro I have nearly 20,000 photos and videos, stretching back 16 years. Most of them unremarkable. Many of them blurry. All of them, in some sense, true.
We swipe back and years compress. Parties, holidays, meals and receipts. Our feet in the sand. A plant we were in the process of killing. A person we used to love and the view from a train. Dozens of dry-cleaning tickets. And a single photograph of a street corner that ends up being the key piece of evidence in a high-stakes legal dispute.
Our photo archive is like a museum, but something closer to evidence – it’s the most complete record of our inner lives. There’s a reason we don’t often photograph the sofa, or the kitchen at 7pm on a Wednesday, or the pile of post behind the front door. And yet sometimes we do, and those are the photographs that decades later might give us pause. Because the sofa is gone. The kitchen was in a flat we left. That person standing there, among that particular arrangement of furniture, is a version of life that no longer exists.
I love the geographical view – the map of the world, every photo you’ve ever taken pinned to the precise spot you took it. I like the Memories too: short, scored, algorithmically generated films that surface at exactly the wrong moment – a bittersweet video of an ex appearing mid-first-date; an important work meeting violently derailed by a Memory of your late hamster.
This technology has been around for ten years. Search a friend’s name, or ‘birthday cake’, and every picture you’ve taken of them appears. But try something more abstract, like ‘goodbye’, and the results become more interesting. Loved ones waving from airport queues. Suitcases and empty houses. I type ‘waiting’ and I’ve got bus stops and the scrum outside a festival urinal. ‘Break-up’ and I’m handed a selfie of myself and an ex-girlfriend, miserable after
a massive fight outside an Indian takeaway. ‘Nostalgia’ returns me family photos from 30 years ago, New Year’s fireworks and karaoke in Japan. And one of my dad, who had an accident a few years ago that left him tetraplegic, throwing a ball for my dog in the park.
It’s like standing in front of an abstract painting. The curation feels, at times, entirely random, and yet the mind goes searching for meaning – and what it finds is sometimes profound, because you’re the only person with the context to make sense of it. And with this new Siri update, our lives will be narrated back to us in ways even more extraordinary, uncanny and unsettling.
The same intelligence that can find a photo of ‘goodbye’ will understand the grammar of a relationship. By cross-referencing your emails and messages, it knows exactly how often you interact with someone, in what places and at what time of day. And it notices when someone simply stops appearing. It recognises patterns you might miss: ageing, complexion and weight fluctuations. It may know you are depressed before you do, that something is physically wrong. This is both a profound gift and a profound intrusion.
Human memory is fundamentally a forgetting machine. It retains the outline and discards a lot of the detail. Our phone’s camera roll, interpreted by AI, will invert this. If we keep taking photos, nothing will be lost. Every face at every party, every meal, every street, organised into chapters, characters and footnotes – the great epic of our lives, the director’s cut, available on demand.
The question of what forgetting does for us psychologically – and what happens when we no longer have to – is something no one can answer yet. And there will always be questions around privacy: who owns our data; children being born into a digital archive they didn’t consent to.
But I find myself going headlong into it all anyway. I photograph everything now, with particular interest in the mundane. My family having a drink in the garden. My girlfriend packing her bag for work. My golden retriever dragging me to the same park for the second time in a day. In five, ten, 20 years, these will be the touchstones, how we’ll remember who we were. It’s another reason, for better or worse, why we’ll never give up our phones.
For now, there is a tribunal to prepare for. I’ll be attending armed with my photographs and screenshots. It is, I’m aware, a parking ticket. But given the high-profile nature of the case, I cannot rule out that powerful forces may prefer I didn’t make it to court. So please, dear reader, consider this: if anything should happen to me, my phone contains the full picture, the whole unremarkable, occasionally magnificent record of a life. It will tell you everything you need to know.