The Death of the Photographer

The digital age is changing wave upon wave of established roles and ideals in the world, and among the clearest victims in the art world is the classic photographer. Once upon a time, the photographer was a beast of expert cunning and unrivaled skill. A man of the split-second, and decisive savior of the moment. As an artform, it required the most technical know-how, time critical decision making, and even just flat out luck. You had only a few moments to get all the settings right on your camera, the framing perfect, and after twenty to thirty someodd pictures, you were down for the count until your next roll was loaded. And all this is before one even stepped into the darkroom; the coordination to work in pitch black and then the skill to burn and dodge a print before the whole thing over-exposes.

But now the job is a little different. There's no mucking in the dark now. There's no endless piles of rolls to deal with and the cost of shooting hundreds upon hundreds of pictures is all but gone. The cameras auto-focus, balance, and take a picture from a lot of the complication of getting all the right settings quickly all down to the push of a button. The process of 'developing' a photo has become more the focus than just a part of the process; now a short process has been frozen in the time bubble we call 'photoshop', which almost influences the final look of the photograph than the actual taking of the picture itself. Moreover, a final product might not even be one picture, but the best parts of many. Maybe the moment was right in one, but the exposure got fucked up or something... there's no crisis of choice now; one can just shop in the values from a better exposed one to combine them into the perfect frankenstien of a picture.

But I suppose the photographer is far from dead, more like reborn. The photographer has been put more into the realm of the painter, a realm of quiet contemplation. He is now in a state of being where the artist is more focused in bringing a piece to be everything it can be rather than the best he could do with a single moment. Welcome to the photographer 2.0.