I just tested this with my fiancée. When I asked her to name famous photographers, she could name Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol.
I don't think the general public ever had that good an idea of what makes a great photograph. How many photographers are well-known to the general public? Very, very few.
Photography's future is assured when people realise that digital picture-making isn't photography at all. It's a clever electronic and data-based recreation of the traditional work-flow of paintings and drawings. Yes, what used to be done by looking, thinking, and hand work can now be done by image capture, processing, and output. The making of pictures out of light sensitive materials, what photography has always been, is a different process with a different relationship to subject matter and a different relationship to the aware viewer.
It doesn't become the truth that digital picture-making is photography even if millions of people say it for a hundred years. Consider a sharp analogy. Californian wine, dry, white, and bubbly was labelled and sold as Champagne for more than a century. Millions bought it and drank it in good faith as Champagne. But it never was the real thing; the wine from Champagne in France. Today Californian wine makers can still (legally under US law) label product as Champagne but few would do it. They would not want to be thought of as people of ill repute. In years to come labelling digipix as photographs will seem just as tacky.
I'm not saying that home decor will all change and what we have today will disappear, but it very well could be less prevalent or far more exclusive.
I posted this before but this is interesting. http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38
I don't think the art of photography is in decline or the end is near or any of that. Not for an instant.
Those who remain committed to analogue / traditional processes will (I keep saying over and over!) be delighted to find that their work is valued more as time goes by. I see this very clearly.
Those who get involved with digital and hybrid processes will see more interesting and individual capabilities and a steady improvement in standards; we just have to remember that digital photography is still in its youth, relatively speaking, and still has quite a long way to go.
On both sides -analogue and digital- there are those people who bitch and moan and think things have gone to hell and the art is finished. Whatever. That's just a completely useless and de-motivating point of view. What these people want remains an enduring mystery. A warm bottle and a blankie? Whatever. Adapt or perish.
Don't agree. Or with the analogy.
I think confusing the process with the goal is not correct. For me being an analog photographer for 30 years and digital photographer for around 5 years and the exclusive printer of both, the tools used is not the real point. The point is the print. What goes on the wall. A artistic likeness of a subject.
We can debate the process and love of process, but using the process as the whole point seems wrong.
We can argue a beautiful processed silver gelatin print is better/worse than a beautifully processed inkjet print but there are two viewers involved. The creator and the buyer/appreciator. And framed and under glass, what the buyer/appreciator is more moved by is subject matter, not process. What the creator values could be process or subject matter or both but what process it took to get it on the wall probably should not be the deciding factor of what constitutes photography.
Until I can look at something and think it onto the wall, then the process of using a camera and an image manipulator (computer or enlarger or chemistry) is to me, photography.
I don't think the art of photography is in decline or the end is near or any of that. Not for an instant.
Those who remain committed to analogue / traditional processes will (I keep saying over and over!) be delighted to find that their work is valued more as time goes by. I see this very clearly.
Those who get involved with digital and hybrid processes will see more interesting and individual capabilities and a steady improvement in standards; we just have to remember that digital photography is still in its youth, relatively speaking, and still has quite a long way to go.
On both sides -analogue and digital- there are those people who bitch and moan and think things have gone to hell and the art is finished. Whatever. That's just a completely useless and de-motivating point of view. What these people want remains an enduring mystery. A warm bottle and a blankie? Whatever. Adapt or perish.
+1, Anybody with enough money can buy high end camera that is full of electronic technology that without any knowledge, training or study by the owner can produce sharp, correctly exposed, and colourful images, this doesn't make them photographers it makes them camera owners, any more than if they bought a Stradivarius violin would make them a violinist, but it doesn't prevent them from seeing it as an opportunity to make easy with the inevitable consequences of getting themselves involved in all sorts of trouble with their clients including law suits, and in the eyes of the general public giving professional photography a bad name.What disgusts me as a working professional are all the teenie-boppers with $500 DSLR's willing to work for free. Clients driven by our less-than-wonderful economy migrate to them and then get disappointed when they receive a crappy product, putting guys like me out of business. My location doesn't exactly help me either which is why I'm moving soon.
I'm not the best out there, but I'm decent, the kids I see getting into this have zero composition and are all "angles and dangles, bokeh, 300 shots of cats and flowers everything I shoot is pretty" None of them even know how to load a roll of film.
Digital has made photography available for even more people, why is that bad? Are we afraid that our club is not so cool anymore?
When it comes to music I had the impression that more bands play live because they make less money on selling CDs due to downlading.
It's not all bad that more people take photos because of digital, but it is not all hunky dory either.
Personally, I see making a good living off of what I do in 20 years, photography. But I am also getting ready for the biggest changes of all to come in the next 5-15 years. I have a feeling that between laws on the rise that Dead Link Removed with it's now even more invasive nature and the technology it self, you won't even begin to fathom those changes for awhile.
But they are coming and it is not all good. I know there will be many a happy photographer or photo enthusiast decades from now, but what it will look like is not what you might think...that is why I posted this, I think people on here are so distracted by the film versus digital debate that they are kind of blind to the bigger picture issues, like the digital versus people debate, photography as a language more than craft debate and how that is going to affect us all.
Yes, through the people who look at it and the people who make it, photography will be fine. But it is going to all change in ways that might make you wish for a time machine, it's part of a bigger picture problem of too much digital everything, much too fast. Because I shoot not just for a passion or a job, but a life, I look at these much bigger picture trends and what they might do.
Technology is it's own best hype machine, it's called the association game. "He says it is the hottest thing out, so it must be, golly gee, I better try it, I don't want to be left behind." Photography has been the poster child of that for at least 10 years in current form and it is only going to get worse. The good news is that when you talk to people off of the net, all is OK in the world, including photography, the hype is just that, hype.
But this *is* going to change photography and what is considered a photograph in even more profound ways than we can imagine...
Think about it man, 20 years from now?
Photography is going through its second great social transition. The first was the development of hand cameras and the first Kodak--you push the button and we do the rest. The technical expertise required to practice photography was significantly lowered and photography became accessible to nearly everyone. Pictorialism was a reaction to the mass production of photography and and an attempt to emphasize craftsmanship and establish photography as a fine art.
The issue today isn't digital itself, but the reduction of the required technical expertise for the practice of photography to essentially zero. Digital enabled the easy and instantaneous production of photography along with the means to easily alter the image. In digital, everything is infinitely malleable. Digital also enabled the rise of social media to create a visible stream for this mass production of images. It's human nature to attract attention--hence the rise of bad HDR and other forms of grotesque manipulation needed to rise above the noise of the image stream. The starving off of arts education and the suppression of the value of the arts in our culture guarantees the domination of a kitsch aesthetic.
Teaching and demonstrating wet plate collodion, I emphasize that photographers should freely draw on every photographic process just as other artists choose from a rich and diverse set of processes. The good news is that the same forces that created the image stream are driving many serious photographers back into what we foolishly term "historical processes".
I think this instant access to everything has not only affected photography it has affected all parts of society.
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