“Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs,” the American essayist Susan Sontag wrote, in 1977. “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”
Event Context
Meanwhile, we don’t retain full ownership of our images. We store them on servers owned by tech companies. The abundance of images is used in a myriad of ways, including as training grounds for facial recognition programs and artificial intelligence.
The selfie camera and Instagram have turned the photograph, once an art form designed to encourage new views of the world, into the ultimate tool of self-obsession; and the ultimate time sink.
There are probably more great pictures taken today than at any time in the history of the camera. Yet, perhaps because the iconic photos of today sweep through a short-attention-span internet or become memes for a period of time, we would find ourselves hard-pressed to name our era’s counterparts to the Great Depression’s Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.
Abundance has created anonymity.
Servers fill up with lost memories. Gigabytes sit on abandoned platforms.
Photography still certifies experience. But there are so many experiences staged for photographs that the value of both is lost.
Team Analysis
There were photojournalists documenting the war in Vietnam. Photographs marked the Kennedy assassination. Nature photography, pioneered by the intrepid British brothers Richard Kearton and Cherry Kearton in 1892 (they disguised themselves as trees and animals to get candid imagery of wildlife), truly came into its own, with National Geographic’s famous Tibet issue of 1905 marking its transition to a photo-based magazine.
Fashion photography bloomed, and the rise of studio publicity and portraits made superstars of Hollywood photographers such as Richard Avedon and Cecil Beaton.
There were significant barriers still. Cameras were expensive. Film roll was expensive too. And photo printing involved treatment with silver halide, also expensive.
These erased the need for film, and suddenly, occasion didn’t matter. There was no cost of production. Then the camera shrunk into the phone, marking the culmination of Sontag’s statement about photography “limiting experience to a search for the photogenic”.
It wasn’t just travel now; dining, cooking, unwinding and even sex became reasons to take a photograph, with the importance of the image often superseding the act itself.
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The ubiquity of the photograph has led to the acceptance of the surveillance state.
We barely notice the cameras wielded by other people, and pay little attention to the monitoring devices that permeate our everyday.
Match Outlook
When Frenchman Nicephore Niepce took the first photograph, in 1826, it was a process that required hours of exposure. It was a scientific miracle: A picture drawn by light itself. (Those hours of exposure, in fact, meant that early images couldn’t capture people, just objects or landscapes. Anything that moved was essentially blurred out. Click here for a slideshow on the evolution of photography.)
In India, it was a hobby only the rich could afford. But preserving the moment in this magical, timeless way was now a universal desire. So, photo studios mushroomed. People visited them dressed in wedding finery or graduation gowns, to stand against elaborate backdrops of elephants or beaches, or to sit on tinfoil thrones.
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There were also photo days, when a cousin or uncle would appear with an Agfa camera and a roll of film, and the family would get all dressed up and pose. A few weeks later, he would return with an envelope full of images that were joyful examined, then preserved in black-leaved photo albums.
There were photo days at school, which remained the only record of friends and classmates, for generations of students through the 20th century, all the way until digital cameras became common.
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Niepce left his notes to followed by fellow Frenchman Louis Daguerre, who created the commercially viable photographic process.
By the mid-19th century, photography was common enough, and exclusive enough, that Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria had their pictures taken. In an odd twist of fate, the first Wanted poster to feature a picture was the one for Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, in 1865.
The first paparazzi image would follow not long after, in 1898, when two men armed with tripods snuck in to take a picture of German leader Otto von Bismarck, aged 83 and on his deathbed.
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Then, in 1900, the Kodak Brownie, a cardboard box camera created to promote sales of Kodak film rolls, went on sale for $1 (about the price of a good dress shirt).
Designed to make photography accessible to the masses, it promoted the idea of a “snapshot” — a picture taken for fun or personal memory, rather than grand event or ceremony — and sparked generations of amateur photographers.
By the time Sontag wrote her 1977 essay, On Photography, the technology had been democratised.
A small shake of the hand or movement of the subject could ruin the picture, and it was rare that every shot on a roll would turn out well. Being a photographer required resources, commitment and patience.
