Photography is Dead

A Rant

In a few years, the only photography left will be the kind done by hobbyists, done to be quaintly archaic; a niche of hipsters and oldsters enamored of the funky process.

For everyone else, it’s melodramatic to say it, but photography really is dead. It was necessary and important for more than a hundred and fifty years, but those utilitarian days are done. Its value and meaning to the public is irreparably changed.

First, there are increasingly better ways to report efficiently — video, 3D; second, there is such a glut of imagery that we have lessened the need to see things we don’t have access to, and it’s harder to capture something that’s not been seen or noticed before; and third, it’s too malleable to be reliable. This maleability is the thing. Because even if a photo is presented we’ve lost one of it’s most important attributes — the presumption of authenticity. And this changes everything.

There are only so many times a viewer will be excited and stunned by an image, only to learn it was fabricated, before it makes more sense not to be amazed by anything, at least until instructed otherwise. That’s a non-reversable shift.

Photography has gone the way of many old technologies — like movable type — where if it’s done at all it’s only for the sport of it. Calligraphy. Archery. Delightfully antiquarian. To do it as a practice, to be purposely constrained. Pottery. Tintypes. Photography itself is becoming an “alternative process.”