God is Afraid of Cameras

 Clickbait title and you clearly fell for it. Or you are the lucky student who is forced to read my blogs. 

This is going to be a short blog where I discuss something I found interesting. I went to Rome the other weekend and visited the Vatican museums. I could describe the museums but that would be boring and I'm not sure I could do it in a way that hasn't already been done. There were a lot of cool, old, and truly mind-boggling pieces of history and art. I would upload photos but I took a lot and you can just use Google images. I wouldn't be able to upload photos from one key place, that place being the Sistine Chapel. Why? Well, at the time I wasn't sure, but I had a great time watching people try and snag photos and ultimately get stopped by security. My friends and I spent a solid 30 minutes in there. Whenever my neck got tired from looking straight up at Michaelangelo's masterpiece, I would take a gander at the people around me and spot the poor souls who were in for a rude awakening. Just when they thought they were in the clear to take a sneaky photo, security would rush over, tell them to put their phone away, and force them to show them deleting the photo they took. Crazy stuff. After looking it up there were multiple reasons, my favorite being copyright issues. That doesn't make any sense. What could you possibly do with a photo of the Sistine chapel on your iPhone? There is no way you can make money off that. It's just a photo and you can find photos online. How do those pictures get there though? Some people can take photos and others can't? Doesn't seem fair. Another reason is that the flashes can be harmful to the artwork. I'm not even sure how that works. The third reason I saw talked about how the chapel should be seen as a place of worship and contemplation which is a very good reason. We do not need our phones everywhere. 

                         Guess who took this photo. Definitely not me because I would get in trouble. But if you guessed Francis S. Origlia of Getty images you would be correct.