In today’s Photography news:
- Canon launches the G12. This is, like the G11, a low megapixel camera (kudos, Canon – good decision. High pixel densities cause more noise).
- The Daily Mirror sacks 6 out of its ten photojournalists. Yes, photojournalism is dead.
- A famous photojournalist was in fact a spy.
The quality of photojournalism has plummeted now that no-one is being paid to do it. There will be few more iconic news images, now that somehow people seem to believe that an amateur image shot on a phone with a 2mm-across lens is as good as an image shot on an SLR with an f/1.4 lens.
Progress cannot be stopped. Just like no-one knows Latin or punctuation anymore, and people think Sweden is the capital of Amsterdam, and just like only 5-10% of people can tell me that 1,000 x 1,000 is one million, this skill too will disappear.
And that is fair enough. “It is what it is”: if society does not value Latin, or math, or photojournalism, or knowledge of history, then they will not be around. Almost no-one reads a newspaper anymore, so why employ photojournalists?
The good news is that while deep ability like this is disappearing, at least the remaining abilities are democratizing. Instead of a few Robert Capas, we have millions (that is, thousands of thousands) of increasingly able amateurs today.
And I am determined to help Canada and the USA and any other areas that I have students in become the best-educated photography nations in the world!
It is very true that we are witnessing a degradation of public taste and degradation of art acceptance. Even with Polaroid era gone more point-and-shooters are satisfied with results of their activity. I am taking pictures for my son’s soccer team and see others parents snapping with cell phones and completely satisfied with blurry no actions results… what is that?
Agreed, and it may be unstoppable. Look where handwriting has gone in the last 200 years: from art to indecipherable. Still, I am am an optimist…