Are we losing the ability to create photographs that have lasting value? What I mean by this is that at times, I fear it is becoming ever more difficult to create a purely artistic photograph that becomes iconic based only on the merits of the
photographer who created that photograph.
The simple fact of the matter is that when you look around at today’s most famous photographs, so many of them are images that have some kind of celebrity to them. These images are famous not necessarily
because of their artistic quality, but because of a famous person or a famous event like a battle or a gathering of some sort.
At the same time, I can’t help but compare these famous images to famous paintings. Although some paintings feature celebrity of some
kind, many more are simple scenes or paintings of people who aren’t necessarily even real, let alone famous. You can look at hundreds of paintings by many, many great painters, including modern painters, and the subject material isn’t famous, but the work is valued as thought-provoking art.
Could this be because photography is
imagined as a disposable medium? To a non-photographer, our art seems easy. Press the shutter button and there you have it — a piece of artwork that took you very little time to imagine and create. This perception isn’t helped by the fact that almost everyone in the modern world has a camera, at the very least a cell phone camera, and it is very easy for anyone to snap images of mildly interesting objects or events.
Further compounding the issue is the fact that not everyone has the time, patience or desire to learn how to manipulate mediums such as watercolors or oil paints. Everyone, however, can learn how to press a shutter button. The result of this ease of use is a literal deluge of photos from millions, possibly billions of people, both photographers and non-photographers alike. The overwhelming majority of these
images are things that are mildly interesting at the moment, or things that are interesting only to a very small group of people such as a family or a group of friends. All of these mildly interesting images, with their limited appeal, serve to give everyone the notion that the entire art form isn’t one with lasting value. That it is, in fact, a cheap and disposable medium...
