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Photography in a Throw-away World
Artists have benefitted greatly from technological convergence and the internet in recent years, with musicians and photographers reaping perhaps the greatest benefits of all. It has become possible for amateur photographers to post their work on the web at dozens of free and paid sites, and with just a little effort, to share their creations with family, friends and strangers: the social networking movement has accellerated this trend to post personal photo collections for the world to see. There is a good deal of quality work online, some that would impress even a discerning audience and shame some so-called professional photographers. Unfortunately, while some images are great, most are hardly worth the bandwidth. This applies even more in the "real" world than online. We thought the holiday slide era was over...sitting through boring hours of Uncle Albert's trip to Greater Ugly while being regailed with Aunty Vera's commentary "Oh, that was where that funny man had the cat...you can't quite see him because he walked behind the house just as Uncle snapped the picture..." etc. It isn't! If only the hundreds of free and commercial slideshow software packages out there came with some training like, how not to bore your audience to death ! It has been argued that the advent of cell phone cameras, high capacity cards in point-and-shoot digital cameras, inexpensive slr and slr-like cameras (to delude snapshooters that they are "photographers") and cheap imaging devices everywhere, have all conspired to devalue the photographic image: to make the photograph just another throw away consumer item; it isn't worth taking the time to get it right, to understand the basics of exposure and composition ~ not when you can just take another if you don't like it. But too often the shooter gets bored before they get it right and moves on to something else; after all, the picture was never the real point of what they were doing. And once recorded the pictues either get buried on a hard disk smewhere or deleted to make room for more, and we never see them, or we have every single one inflicted on us! Oddly, This view may be just the opposite of what is happening: the ability for anyone to record everything everywhere has not resulted in a degradation in the value of the photograph: professionals continue to make a living; prices for pictures don't seem to have declined; magazines, newspapers, books and electronic media seem to have an insatiable hunger for photos and continue to pay for them. Perhaps the ease with which a photo can be captured is so much at odds with the effort and skill that is required to make a lasting or arresting image that the public has begun to recognise how good a photo could be and how badly the casual pic compares. Camera stores are another matter; unlike photo "developers", who seem to have adapted pretty well to the move from film to digital, retailers of photographic equipment do seem to have suffered as the camera has changed from an enthusiasts hobby item to a consumer electronic one: but that is for another post. |
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The copyright for this content entitled "Photography in a Throw-away World" has been specified by the contributor as:
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This intel was contributed by David Rich
David Rich
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May, 2012
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