The Death of Photography?

A few interesting announcements have bounced across my screen over the last few days concerning the future of Photography. The first of these was the rumor that Pentax will leave the traditional camera market for digital-only photography products. This immediately made me sad; my first serious camera was the trusty, if archaic, Pentax K-1000, a sturdy and simple SLR camera that for decades enabled broke art students to buy a servicable 35mm camera. Although discontinued, I know that I can still use this workhorse for my own work, slides, and other 35mm needs. So I was sad to think that this "Big 5" camera maker might leave the business.

And yet I still have great hope for the future of the photograph. For example, here is a snippet from an interview with Derrick Story, author of the new Digital Photo Hacks from O'Reilly Publishing:

Kathryn Barrett: Now that digital cameras are outselling film cameras, what sort of effect will this have on the state of photography? And what about the computer side of the equation? If computers are necessary, could that hurt widespread adoption?

Derrick Story : I think photography is on the rise. It's so instantaneous. You take a picture with your digicam or camera phone, and then you look at it. "Hey, that's great; I'll keep it," or "OMG I look I've just been beat with an ugly stick; trash that picture now!" It all happens within a matter of seconds.

You don't need a computer for digital photography, although I find them quite helpful. But for example, my sister takes photos, puts the memory card directly into a printer, outputs a few snapshots, then files the card away. Memory cards are cheap enough where you can do that if you want. I can't get her to return my email, but she is totally digital when it comes to photography.

In general, we don't write letters anymore, we hardly know our family history, we don't sit around the dinner table and tell stories, but we do like to take pictures. And thanks to the metadata embedded in the files, those pictures are our living history. Photography is going to become more ubiquitous than ever before.

Pictures as living history - this is both an exciting and frightening time to be a visual artist in general and one who deals with photography in particular. Not since the invention of the Brownie Camera has the cutting edge of photographic technology been easily available to the public at large. Can we survive this onslaught of photos now beginning to crest? Is there room for a professional image maker when everyone can make images at a whim? What is the role of a visual artist when everyone is already capturing their own "living history?" But this blog entry is getting long, so more on this later...