Everybody is a Photographer

Today, everybody is a photographer.  The camera in our phones has revolutionized photography.  It has also revolutionized the way in which we look at photography.  When I was a child, my family subscribed to Life Magazine.  I devoured the photography in that magnificent publication and came to love black & white images.  National Geographic was also in our home and I was drawn to it as well, but for different reasons primarily having to do with a burgeoning love of travel.  Eighty years ago there were far fewer images in our lives and they were smaller.  Some of the most important were framed and hung on the wall.  Billboards were out there when we traveled, of course, but they were novelties.  

Breakfast

Today, we are constantly surrounded by images and many of the most interesting of them move.  Technology has stimulated the revolution, of course, by giving us the internet, our phone and social media.  Today, early in the morning, we photograph our breakfast and send it proudly to friends and family.  Construction workers air drop images to one another as they discuss challenges at work.  Satellites and drones record every inch of the world around us.  Technicians photograph our innards during surgery.  Not only do we record images of everything in our lives, increasingly we communicate through images as exemplified by Facebook and Instagram.  We are on our phones and computers so much during the day that we track our screen time and ensure that we get enough steps in even if we have to do it at our standup desk.  We talk less and photograph more.  Memes and emojis fill in around the edges.

Technology is also improving the cameras that we use.  Today’s better cameras capture an amazing amount of information about the scene at which they are pointed.  Software has been developed that can manipulate that information to improve and or change the image as first recorded.  Mountains can be moved, light can be added or taken away, images can be combined and altered.  That software has gotten so capable that a photograph is no longer the proof of much of anything.  It is but an image - make of it what you will.  

A billboard in Oregon advertising the Gualala Arts Photography Club.

I am not a psychologist, but I suspect that all of this is impacting humanity in very fundamental ways.  One of the aspects of this explosion in photography that interests me a great deal is how it impacts our perception of reality and what that means with regard to our relationship one with another.