In the Future, Will Anyone See Your Photos?

This week we’ll all be eagerly reading reports about the important business the nation is conducting as Americans prepare to choose what kind of nation this will be in the future. No, I’m not talking about the presidential primary being held today in New Hampshire—I’m talking about the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Already we know that Blu-Ray has won the election over high-def DVD formats. Comcast is promising nearly unlimited choices of on-demand entertainment, which will come as a surprise to all those analysts who have been writing off the cable industry. Consumer electronics and photography have essentially become part of the same technological world, so we expect to hear some news about out special world coming out of CES as well.
     Now, however, let me come to the point of this meandering post: I have a gnawing suspicion that the wonderful technology that is offering us so many choices will in fact be the death of photography—or at least photography in one particular sense: That we make pictures so that other people can see what we have seen. It may be that in the future no one will really look at your pictures. You may be the only one who cares about what you have seen. And even you might not be that interested.

Like a lot of people, I am constantly attempting to come to terms with the constant onslaught of paradigm-shifting technology. I love all the new stuff—primarily my DVR—and I get excited when I think about where all these new gadgets are taking us.
     But CES is also a time of anxiety for me, and I think for other people my age. My teenage kids approach it all fearlessly. For them, the promises of consumer technology are exactly in line with the big political promise that every candidate wants to make this year: “Change is Good!”
    Yesterday’s New York Times carried an intriguing piece about all this by media reporter David Carr, who, like me, has a vested interest in the future of mainstream media. Carr characterizes that old form of public communication in McLuhanesque terms as the “mass media.” By that he means mainstream media that “is intended to form a tribe.” The new forms of technology are pushing us toward a “personal media” in which “a tribe is already assembled and then surrounded with customized media.” In other words, Flickr forms a community—or maybe it’s better to say that a community forms around Flickr—and all of us upload material to be shared.
      Does this new personal media represent the ultimate triumph of the individual over the dictatorial forces of big media? Or is it simply the logical conclusion to a media trend that’s been going on since the 1960s—the idea of niche publishing? The niche here isn’t simply a topic like photography or wooden boat building—the niche is you.
      And boy, what a turnabout that is. I had boss who once gave me some advice about editing a magazine: He reminded me that the magazine I was editing wasn’t really mine, that it belonged to other people (shareholders) and ultimately to the people who bought it and read it. You don’t choose publish what you want just to satisfy your own ego or interests, but theirs. “You don’t edit the magazine you love,” he said, “but you also must love the magazine you edit.” Well, he was French and very wise and it sounded significant when he said it.
      The new personal media is much different. It may even, as Carr suggests, be downright narcissistic. The question is whether anyone will care about the images and stories that all of us happy individuals are uploading. He mentions that some “experts” (anyone know who he means?) now suggest that average number of times a photo is viewed “is dropping from one toward zero.” We all have so many photos on our hard-drives and flash cards that we don’t even bother to really look at them all.
      I also wonder whether the world of personal media will allow us any room to behave as creatures with inherent common interests. When I was in college we used to take classes about the mass media to learn about how we were all being manipulated. Maybe one day we’ll look back fondly at mass interests. Here is one this I am sure of: In politics, change is an option that we can choose or reject. In technology it is a given.

Comments

[Ron Diorio]

"that average number of times a photo is viewed “is dropping from one toward zero"

Even if the math was correct do you think that is worse than a contact sheet where you may get one print. Or five rolls from a family vacation where one print is enshrined on the refrigerator door. or a carousel slide show .....

[richard friedman]

People will still want to see images that they couldn't have taken themselves, either because they weren't alive when they were taken, or had never been where they were taken, or whatever.

My Dad never expected that pictures he took of the family in 1946 would ever be seen by anyone else. And certainly that is still the case with probably most pictures taken by people with digital cameras today.

But there will always be another set of people with the technical know-how to show their pictures to a wider global audience, and there will always be a curious set of people eager to search them out and look at them, especially if they are images that the viewer him/herself could not have taken because of the reasons mentioned above, etc.

I wouldn't worry so much.

I would worry about the poor guy who insists on taking 5000 images per week. I think the technology is liable to spawn new compulsions and obsessions among people where there weren't any before.

And, I would worry about how we're going to store all those images going forward.

[Bartholemu Simpson]

Whoever wrote this stuff surely wasn't at CES, where every which way you looked there was another giant print or giant LCD screen showing off high res (or high def) still images and movies. Then everywhere else were LCD picture frames, MP3 players with still image review, cheap 8MP and up cameras for more picture taking, and mass storage cards and drives for more pictures. A Kodak printer won a show award, for heaven's sake. The show is getting to be all about taking pictures and video and sharing it all over the house, internet, and on camera phones. How does that instill fear in an editor of a photo magazine? You should be rejoicing about all the new toys we photographers are getting.

[Andrew Gillis]

The writer may be on to something--the easier (technically) and the more ubiquitous photography has become, the less value it is perceived to possess. Part of the problem is the relentless availability of images, with the consequent loss of any concept of an original having greater value than a flickering low resolution copy on the web.

I teach college level photography classes, and try to acquaint my students with some history and with actual prints by serious photographers. Some of them get it, but many of them don't.

[Kate Paine]

Previous comments give balance to "...Will Anyone See Your Photos?"All future is conjecture, of course, but the obvious now is in the viewing of photographs: there's so much chaff, it's difficult to find the wheat.

[Wayne Anderson]

From my experience, people pay a lot more attention to prints than to e-photos (in the same way that they pay more attention to a real post card with a hand-written message and a real stamp on it than to an e-post card sent thoughtlessly to dozens of recipients). I make prints of my photos to send as Xmas cards and note cards, and am always surprised at the number of comments I get and the number of people who save these cards year after year. I certainly agree that the easy availability of e-photos cheapens them. Most people probably just beep them off their computer, as I do.