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Why photograph when every picture has already been made?

tuga

tuga

Legal Alien
Why photograph when every picture has already been made?

In the age of smartphones and social media, there is the idea that all pictures look alike. The algorithms make them look alike. Tourist sites make backdrops designed for social media, restaurants cook food that looks great on Instagram, and people experience every aspect of life through the images that they make. The image overwhelms the experience until it becomes the experience and reality ceases to exist. All you’re left with is an Instagram feed for your memories.

continues here:

https://witness.worldpressphoto.org...ry-picture-has-already-been-made-9dbbb0df7390
 
I agree, smartphone photos and instabangers are utterly pointless, but it's the cult of personality, not photography, that they represent. Photography is doing just fine in the hands of skilled practitioners
 
I think that there is a smartphone app which warns you when the framing that you're about to capture has already been taken and if I remember correctly how many times.



I often wonder, when walking around town (Oxford), why on earth people are framing what they're framing and how...
 
Smartphones are great for family snaps, times without a camera etc, better than ever before in fact so let's not be snobbish about that, it's really to be welcomed.
 
sq225917 said:
I agree, smartphone photos and instabangers are utterly pointless, but it's the cult of personality, not photography, that they represent. Photography is doing just fine in the hands of skilled practitioners
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what pretentious nonsense, why then are the skilled practitioners making amazing images with smart phones.

its comments like these that will destroy photography.

Photography is about capturing a moment, framing and understanding the subject. This can be achieved with a phone by anyone
 
I took a photograph today of a bit of the factory where I need an airline installing. I could have done with it already having been taken, but there you go.
 
Every picture has not been made
That's exactly the point.

But aspiring to a conventional-mediocrity, like ''pic of thing I am about to eat, with a filter to flatter I don;t understand' & sim instagram BS, isn't photography, so much as - convenient memory-aid materiel. We've all got boxes of (real prints, or data) ancient lousy snaps that don't really merit wider circulation, but raise a smile when rediscovered. That's the locus.

Look - decades ago, people used to buy 110 cartridge cameras for that kind of crap. It has a place, and technically even then almost every conceivable issue has been covered.

And ubiquity doesn't amount to quality. Photography for its own sake, remains an art - for Art's sake ( /vs instagram, for god's sake...)
 
I thought the point was to do things because you enjoy doing them, not whether someone has done them already?

I for example, like making B&W prints, not because i'm good at it, or because it's not been done before, but because it's fun.
 
I and many people I know have photographic prints from up to 150 years ago, the vast majority perfectly preserved. But absolutely nothing since the "digital revolution" of the late 90s. Billions of images that get "made" without a thought, and then inevitably lost without a thought when a 'phone stops working or gets lost, an old computer is thrown away, a hard disk fails and is replaced, or formats change, or images on floppy disks or CDs are no longer readable. For the sake of convenience and being able to photograph food before we eat it we have lost our visual memory. This is going to, already has, change the way people are, the way they think, the way they see themselves and other people in a historical context. It frightens me!
 
Nothing to be frightened of, you’ve lost me there.
Were things better before digital photography? Maybe for a few, but most people just couldn’t afford to photograph much with film. How long did the average roll of 35mm sit in the camera before being sent off to Truprint?
 
Tony Lockhart said:
Nothing to be frightened of, you’ve lost me there.
Were things better before digital photography? Maybe for a few, but most people just couldn’t afford to photograph much with film. How long did the average roll of 35mm sit in the camera before being sent off to Truprint?
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From what I remember in my family, a film could sit in the camera for weeks. You only took a picture when you were sure, or had hopes, that it was worth it. After a holiday one or two rolls would go to the chemist to be developed and printed on postcard size paper. It was all "permanent", and the negatives were carefully preserved.
 
Tony Lockhart said:
Why not?
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Well, the grandparents of a child born today might have died in 1985, for instance. At their death, there would have been hundreds of photographs of them taken throughout their lives. Then, in 2000 their son or grandson comes along and thinks, "we can't have this cardboard box of photos taking up space, we'll choose the 50 best ones and have them scanned and burn the rest." So maybe 500 photos, taken between 1890 and 1985, are destroyed. Only 50 survive digitally on the grandson's computer. Computer breaks down, gets lost or stolen, someone erases "grandad" folder by mistake, and all is lost.
Normal people do not "back up" and back up their back-ups methodically, or keep hard disks in a safe at the bank.
 
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