October 18, 2013

The photo industry is a facade.  It isn't image creation with purpose that is important now for businesses, it is finding a snapshot, a shallow expression that will fill a small screen for less than a few seconds and sell a product that won't be around next year. It is no longer about the image, but the technology that feeds social media.  That is where the money is made.  Photographs are secondary, less than secondary, they are fillers, party favors, cheap, plentiful and dumb, put up on websites so ads can pop up and sell you more technology or some other personal item or service you never knew you needed.

We have in the photo industry lost absolute control over our product.  And because we have lost control of our product we can't price the image for its true value.  We can chase a moving goal post and claim small victories as we keep losing the ability to our pay bills.  But the bottom line is that photographs are now a zero sum investment for the money men.  It is the new wow technologies that are the real money makers for the venture capitalists.  Photography is a numbing visual redundancy.  An imitative boring expose of "here I am, look at me and what I just did".  It is beyond embarrassing it is vulgar and exposes us to the existential reality of the absurd.  

In these board rooms I can hear the money men with their slick smiles telling investors, "don't worry about the photogs, they have already signed over their rights, so we can use and sell their images cheaper and cheaper.  And guess what, we will have them pay for their own storage on our websites by this new gimmick called the Cloud and we can give away their images at whatever price we deem necessary to increase volume".  A good deal all around for the titans of the venture capitalist market.

This drive to exploit imagery, in turn exploits the people taking these pictures, it becomes an addictive cycle of photographic abuse.  Seeing these images, becomes the motive to imitate them or take it one step further on up the ladder of obsession.  You must ask yourself what is the purpose of uploading every detail of your ordinary life.  There is only one reason, human frailty.  The need to be seen at any cost.  This fixation on social media doesn't allow us to slow down and see the world through our own unique eyes.  Social media is a distraction to inner reflection.  There is a special quality in all of us, and that is what needs to be expressed.

We seem to be born followers, and will follow the herd mentality right off the cliff of exploitation.  We now see the world through technology, losing the memories that we had of actually living in this world and experiencing things first hand and not through a small window of dull expressions.  In our lives are constant distractions from making the world our own.

We live trying to keep up with the ever expanding technology that makes image taking easier and easier but in the long run reduces the intent of photography to an artifact of bygone days. We have an artificial product now exploited by big business. But how often is an image made nowadays, that a human mind actually reflected longer than a split second to find a composition, a perspective that made an image worth taking.  We tend to ignore the real world and focus on surface glitter, this new fast paced run and gun crowd sourced slop that overwhelms our senses and our ability to see the babble that is dominating our lives in a negative way.