[markdesmarais]

Heard about this article on a podcast... interesting stuff. I've started using google photos, and the stuff that it puts together can be pretty compelling.

In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing - The New Yorker

[dsmithhfx]

the film-photography revival of today—a luxury to feed our nostalgia, a wistful effort to exercise human control over a task machines have taken over from us

Some things he guessed right. This part is wrong.

[pathdoc]

From the article:

But make no mistake: it is only a matter of time before Nik goes the way of the film camera—into the dustbin of technological history.

What this tells me is that the author is full of **** and so is the article. Others' interpretation may differ.

[RGlasel]

The article opens with a quote from Susan Sontag. My first thought was that in the future, no one will remember who Susan Sontag was. It's a very flawed article, but not because it quotes Sontag. For starters, not even the most vapid iPhone selfie shooter takes photographs without having at least the intention of viewing them later. To link Google giving away Nik Collection to any kind of mass societal shift is a desperate ploy to get a 500 word piece in New Yorker. What Malik doesn't write, but would be more insightful, is that in the present, if your name isn't in a noteworthy byline at any given point in time, the collective memory starts to forget who you are.

The article throws in quotes from a couple of future-thinkers infinitely less noteworthy than Sontag, a couple of musings about Google's indexing algorithms and cloud computing and ends with "The amateur in me is thrilled by the prospect of living in the Cloud, editing on the go. The purist in me wonders if, in the future, desktop photo editing will be like the film-photography revival of today—a luxury to feed our nostalgia, a wistful effort to exercise human control over a task machines have taken over from us. I wonder what Sontag would make of that."

What is that? Amateurs getting thrills by editing photos over an Internet connection? How is being a purist in anything linked to desktop computing as expensive nostalgia? Where is the argument to support the idea that human beings manually performing tasks that can be automated is futile? Sontag has been dead for more than a decade, but if she was still alive and still commenting, I doubt if she would interrupt her loathing of the society that supported her to express an opinion about this piece of fluff.

Photography is a communications medium. The problem with the type of photography conducted by most people who take hundreds of photographs with their smartphone is that they are almost exclusively communicating with themselves, even if that wasn't their intention. As the number of times we communicate with others increases, the amount of information remembered decreases. But what applies to the mainstream doesn't apply to individuals, so individuals become more knowledgeable about things that are less important to everyone else. And we can all see that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but we can't agree on the reasons why.

[pathdoc]

To link Google giving away Nik Collection to any kind of mass societal shift is a desperate ploy to get a 500 word piece in New Yorker.

But does this say something about the author only, or about the New Yorker also, that it published it?

What Malik doesn't write, but would be more insightful, is that in the present, if your name isn't in a noteworthy byline at any given point in time, the collective memory starts to forget who you are.

Assuming it even knew or cared in the first place.

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.” (Stephen Crane, 1899)

[dsmithhfx]

The role of desktop computing has been to support photo organizing and editing. It is a replacement for wet darkrooms and contact prints. True, you don't actually need it if your photography is done with a smart phone, but that is irrelevant. You did not need a darkroom back in the day, when you could mail away your exposed film and get prints back. The vast majority of folks use photography to document their own and their families lives. The rest may also use it for many, many other reasons, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. For some, mobile technology will be a part of that. For others, it won't. The main differences are: physical display size (currently a deal-breaker for smart phones), processing power, and local storage. Current mobile technology is getting there, but it ain't there yet.

[RGlasel]

But does this say something about the author only, or about the New Yorker also, that it published it?

Om Malik has been a pretty big deal in the world of professional online publishers. Not so much now. As for the New Yorker, they have deadlines to meet and the publishing monster is insatiable. When I used to spend a lot of time in airplanes I would often buy magazines like New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly before boarding. Then I bought a subscription to Atlantic Monthly and discovered that every issue didn't have enough content of interest to me to justify what I was "saving off the cover price."

[pathdoc]

When I used to spend a lot of time in airplanes I would often buy magazines like New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly before boarding.

Then I bought a subscription to Atlantic Monthly and discovered that every issue didn't have enough content of interest to me to justify what I was "saving off the cover price."

It's amazing how fascinating something can be when you have nothing else worthwhile to read or do. I brought a book with me to a ticket lineup recently - Herb Keppler's The Asahi Pentax Way - and left it aside when I was sick of carrying it. It was eventually seized on by a couple of little girls who couldn't have been much older than nine, and I couldn't help thinking how utterly bored with everything else they must have been to flick through what for that age must be a very dry discourse. Maybe they will both grow up, get interested in photography and ask their parents for Spotmatics; who knows? (I got it back undamaged, by the way.)

[uday029]

Nothing groundbreaking but it is interesting to read about how we as a society are happily accepting this change in culture of "photography".

[GlennG]

Could be. Thanks for linking this. Certainly seems to have a lot of truth, what with the estimate of 4 billion photo uploads every day. Yet, I seem to think that at some point there will be a counterbalance to all of this. Not a backlash, per se, but the swinging of the pendulum away, or at least to something different that I don't know what it will be.

[jrpower10]

I think it's already swinging. Still photography is being replaced with video. Where I used to see still photographs as 95% of Facebook posts, I'm now seeing video amping up and stills falling off.

[Rondec]

There are two problems I see. The first thing is that while we have increased the number of photos the majority are pretty poor, both from a technical and from a composition standpoint. And since they only exist on phones and the Internet, they are unlikely to survive in any real way more than a year or two. The second thing is that I believe that people are so interested in documenting their lives that they cease to really enjoy it. If you are at your kid's ball game, it is better to snap a few photos and then cheer them on, rather than snap two hundred photos in the hope that there is one where you get an SI quality photo.

It has been shown that people do not remember events as clearly when they are focused on taking photos of them. I would rather make memories than shoot every aspect of my life. But then again, I'm older than a lot of these folks too.

[biz-engineer]

Not an issue. There is still space for artists with medium format. I once posted here that flickr and other sites alike are full of garbage, a that triggered protests from PF. But, yeah, there is even more garbage now: a lot of photos, 80% of them being no more than a record of data.

[Jonathan Mac]

At the beginning of the year Flickr had an official "Your best shot of 2015" group. 90% of it was rubbish and that was the best.

[RobA_Oz]

I suggest we don't get too worked up about this. The major problem I see with the article is that the headline has precious little to do with the content - in another area of online discussions, we'd be tempted to call it "clickbait".

The author is right when he infers that people take lots of photos that they have no idea what to do with, beyond the immediate, but that's always been true to some extent. In the days of film, there was less to deal with and, beyond the photo album, photos tended to get lost in cupboards, filling old shoeboxes, ready only to be sifted through by survivors for a funeral montage. Google and Facebook, as ever ready to monetise their users' casual disregard for such matters, is promoting a means of turning slackness into something that may or may not be useful to someone - if only for a memorial service.

The headline, though, seizes on something that seems currently popular with some academics and schoolteachers, and that's the idea that the ubiquity of photography is causing us to lose the ability to remember what we see. I think that argument is seriously flawed, as any courtroom will evidence, where there's more than one witness to an incident, but I've been hearing nine-year-olds earnestly enjoining their elders at scenic spots to "not take photos with your camera: take photos with your mind". It's possible that a sub-editor has decided it would be a good idea to link the article with this current fad.

I take a lot of photos, and the ones that I want to share, I put on Flickr. Many of them are simple records of places I've been and occasions that I think are notable. Most have no value to anyone but me, my family and friends, but occasionally one will be "faved" by a knowledgable person, and who am I to question their judgment? All of them will have been processed by me, to bring our the best possible image as I see it, but they aren't in any stretch of the imagination great works of art. None of them are intentional selfies, but at least I'll have some say in what goes into my funeral montage.