As we all know the advent of digital photography has changed photography enormously. Not only has it fundamentally changed the way photography businesses operate, and how professionals are perceived, it has changed our whole relationship with photography. And by ‘our’ I mean everyone’s.
What once was a very simple relationship, both in nature and in volume, and which might have been called ‘me and my photo album’ is now a complex web of relationships with a vast array of both print and digital media. Through this over saturation of imagery, we have become sophisticated consumers of visual communications, and we consume imagery voraciously on a daily basis, but still the vast majority of people don’t look past the surface impression and still don’t have a good understanding of what makes a professional photographer a professional, and an amateur just that.
It is clear, that in many ways photography is being devalued. Online, the $5 stock library sites, like istock.com are a good example. Getty Images and other traditional image libraries look to be surviving, but their market has decidedly shrunk. Some will say this is just natural selection, and in a strict sense they are right, but the implications of devaluing photography goes a lot further than getting a bargain stock shot.
And it’s not just the digital revolution that’s getting us in trouble. Sheer media overload is causing problems as well. Attention spans are getting smaller. Research tells us that at a photography exhibition, we can expect to hold people’s gaze on a single image for no more than 3 seconds. The images had better be good if you are going to hold them longer than that.
In educational institutions teaching photography there are also massive changes. Out with the traditional darkroom skills, in with Photoshop. Yet by its very nature, digital photography can be a poor teacher, with its wide latitude of error, instant feedback and cost efficiencies. Digital doesn’t help students learn to ‘get it right behind the lens’, because they know they can just ’shoot the shit out of it’, and fix it in Photoshop if it’s ordinary. But of course many of these same things are the positive benefits of digital. Being able to rattle off hundreds of frames without thinking of cost is amazing, and Photoshop is just a fabulous new fangled digital darkroom. ( There is a big hint in this if we will listen. As is often the case, mixing the best of the old ways with the best of the new is a smart way to do things…)
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