In an Age of Likes, Commonplace Images Prevail

There are well over a billion camera phones being used to photograph dinners, dogs, cute kids, sunsets and body parts — recording every action as if it were of equal importance.

It is estimated that 380 billion images were taken last year, most with a camera phone. Over 380 million photos are uploaded on Facebook every day. Instagram is growing exponentially and had four billion photos uploaded as of July 2012.

Almost everyone has a camera and is a photographer.

Just as access to pens and paper hasn’t produced thousands of Shakespeares or Nabokovs, this explosion of camera phones doesn’t seem to have led to more Dorothea Langes or Henri Cartier-Bressons. But it has certainly led to many more images of what people ate at lunch.

Because of the iPhone and social media, the very meaning of what photographs are and how they function has changed radically in the last four years.

A photograph is no longer predominantly a way of keeping a treasured family memory or even of learning about places or people that we would otherwise not encounter. It is now mainly a chintzy currency in a social interaction and a way of gazing even further into one’s navel.

This is a fundamental change that must be having a powerful effect on how people view the kind of images exhibited this week in Perpignan.

As far as one can see — admittedly from ground level — there are two possible effects on “serious” photography.

1. The flowering of photographers leads to millions of people who are thinking more visually and whom we may be able to entice to become an audience for documentary and photojournalistic images.

2. We are bombarded with so much visual stimuli via the Web and social media that it becomes almost impossible to rise above the flood of images. And if everyone likes everything, no one photograph is better than another.

There is no hinting to which of these situations might happen. Or if there will be a combination of these effects.

The issue is not whether one chooses to use an iPhone instead of a Leica but the ideas and vision of the photographer.

The effect of the Web on the photography business is ancient news. Film versus digital — prehistoric, at least in the accelerated time chamber of social media and the Web.

Six years ago the core questions we faced were: How do we distribute our work and make a living in the digital age? Since then, some photographers have survived, perhaps with fewer assignments and more crowdsourcing, foundation grants and N.G.O. money.

The proliferation of a commonplace — or vernacular — photography is a much more profound change. The question is not so much whether this is a good thing for society (or a bad thing for photographers). It is happening, a billion times a day, and there is no going back.

The question is: How does the photographic community harness this explosion of visual energy to expand its audience? This is what needs to be focused on.

(content courtesy of [and excerpted from] nytimes.com/LENS/Estrin; image courtesy of amazingimagesgallery.blogspot.com)

- E