Robin Wong at 10:35, transcribed by myself:
“The content of photography itself has changed. Instead of the photographer taking a photograph of something else, they direct attention back to themselves. … Look at what all your friends are posting. It’s photographs of themselves, selfies, the vacation that they are taking, the food that they are eating, their pet cat….
Everything is about me, me, me, me, me. Photography has become a selfish, self-centric adventure. Photography is no longer about documentation, story telling, or about creating art. It’s all about shooting yourself, shooting your daily life, and trying to show the world how amazing your life is.
The use of a camera has become irrelevant. All you need is your smartphone.”
Robin wrote about this in his companion article:
REASON 3 – SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGED THE LANDSCAPE OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Social media has changed the content of photography over the years, and shifted how the crowd perceive photography, resulting in cameras being irrelevant in this modern digital age.
Let’s take a few steps back, in the older days, how does a photographer get noticed or recognized for his art and talent? You get published, you get exhibited. Find an art gallery, do a real physical photography exhibition with prints, and you are seen as a successful photographer. Now in this digital age, all photographers can exhibit, you don’t need an art gallery, you don’t need to work with a curator, or editors, you bypass all that, from your social media platform you can reach thousands, or possibly millions if you play your card right (I obviously played mine wrong, I failed to grow my Instagram, and even my YouTube and Facebook have sad number of followings). My point is, the way people see, value and interact with photography have changed drastically, and this was because of the dominance of social media in our lives.
Here comes a big problem, social media promotes the culture of me, me, me and me. Photography has never been about the photographer (so literally), photography is about the photographer shooting the world around them. Hence the lens was pointed outward from the shooter not inward. Take a look at your Facebook friends, the Instagram accounts that you follow, any celebrities or “influencers”, the content published online was ALL about themselves and the lives that they live. Is it not the food that they eat, the places they travel to, the parties they are at, the dress that they wear, the cat or dog cute poses or that amazing car that they just bought? Photography, which was a genuinely powerful tool of art and documentation has been vilified and reduced to mere selfie tools. Photography has become selfish, self-centric adventure and is losing the core meaning of why the camera was invented in the first place.
You don’t need 61MP for your selfie photographs, you don’t need ISO100,000 to shoot that slice of cake, and certainly you don’t need a super-telephoto 600mm lens to shoot your Siamese cat licking her paws. The relevance of having a camera is eroding away so quickly, now that the purpose of photography has shifted so much. There is no longer a need for a camera to do the “modern photography” for social media.
Real Reasons Why Camera Market Is Shrinking
Nov 20, 2019
Camera sales are declining over the years and we are too easy to make smartphones the villain. I am exploring several real reasons why the camera market is shrinking, and how photography is slowly losing interest. This article is made in accompaniment with a blog article here: https://robinwong.blogspot.com/2019/1…
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