Photography is dead! ?

I seem to have heard this argument more than once.

Indeed, in this era, we can never find the brilliance of photography. Thanks to the development of the Internet and smart phones, the threshold for photography is getting lower and lower. As long as there is a device that can take pictures, people can call themselves photographers. The spread of image garbage on the Internet makes the integrity of photography itself decline.

The photos are simple and clear, others will say what this kind of film is, and I can take it. It's hard, it's hard to understand, and others will say they don't understand. Can you call it art? Then burn incense with clean hands and put it on the keyboard to punish it.

Most people don't understand that they are not profound, smart, critics or artists. They just have access to the internet.

The 20th century is the golden age of all types of photography. Before the popularization and convenience of photographic equipment, all kinds of photography have made unprecedented development and formed a unique style. From Joseph Kaudelka to Gary Vinogrande, these pioneers tell us with their wonderful works that the key to real photography is not the equipment, it can be subtle and meticulous observation, it can be silent telling. Oskar barnack's great invention miniaturized photographic equipment, so that photographers no longer need to carry heavy equipment to shoot, but can take their 35mm Leica cameras all over the streets to capture wonderful pictures, record the diversity of human civilization and seize unforgettable historical moments.

They recorded these moments on film. Although most recorded people are not used to being photographed, they will not easily regard them as threats or invasion of privacy, but happily accept the freeze of this image. In the era when the Internet was underdeveloped, images spread very slowly, in magazines, exhibitions and photo albums. However, it is undeniable that the pictures that can appear in the communication channels are all photos selected by photographers. After several rounds of screening, the quality itself will not be too bad.

Today, everything is different. With the development of the Internet and the progress of science and technology, the Internet has given everyone a space and platform to publish independently. The development of smart phones makes cameras everywhere. However, all this seems to have brought a terrible consequence to photography, creating a large number of similar and meaningless images.

It seems that although more and more photos have been seen in recent years, fewer and fewer photographers can name them. After all, they are still the same people as before. It seems that no photographer can ever make the world remember his name.

But does this mean that photography is dead? In a sense, the ritual glory brought by photography has long since ceased to exist, and it has been replaced by a way of life. People will no longer go to the photo studio to take family photos, but can take out their mobile phones to record the time in front of them.

But this does not mean that the world we live in is no longer worth recording, but will be frozen in more diverse ways.

By 1960s and 1950s, 75% of American families had their own cameras. From 1960s to 1970s, Americans consumed 9 billion movies every year, most of which were just simple family snapshots.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the trend of photography was to look for changes and developments in the world and then record these changes. In such an era of information explosion, our daily life has long been squeezed by endless information. In this seemingly calm era, the change is no longer so obvious, and the highlight of emotion has become the photographer's next pursuit goal. With the rapid development of society, we often ignore what is new or exciting, and those lost are more noticeable.

Since the 1970s, photographic artists began to transplant their ideas into their own works, creating surreal images one after another. And this surreal trend, just after the popularization of digitalization, became popular again.

In the 1990s, photography developed to digital, and more and more contemporary artists began to use computer technology to form images, and described the images recreated by software (not post-adjustment, but completely recreated) as photography, which made people feel that photography itself was becoming less and less important. PS seems to have become a curse, and later it was added with another meaning, which was widely criticized.

These fictional images began to gradually enter the public's field of vision with the Internet, and became a new art form under the guidance of public opinion and critics, and were auctioned and boasted as "works of art".

It is these exaggerations that make some people who stick to traditional photography depressed and throw out the argument that "photography is dead".

The collapse of paper media also led to the decline of image printing, giving people another illusion that photography is dead.

Of course, photography is only a medium to record reality. Although it looks extremely important, it is the simplest and cheapest. You just need unremitting efforts and a little luck. Photography doesn't need a good education. Anyone can pick up the camera in his hand and record what happened in front of him. Most photographers have not received orthodox photography education, but have taught themselves by interest.

In essence, this is a fair voice, record your thoughts with the equipment in your hand.

Excellent photographic works still exist, and the number will only be more than in the past. Only in modern society, the huge base of pictures published through private public channels every day is somewhat insignificant.

Excellent photographers still exist. Even if you haven't heard of them, they must be working hard in their own fields. They follow their own photography ideas instead of paying attention to the number of followers on social networks, and interpret their images in their own way. I believe that in the near future, more and more people will have a deeper understanding of their own artistic works.

There are good photographs and bad photographs in every era, but in the era of underdeveloped information in the past, you may not see bad works, but now, you just watch too much.

According to CIPA statistics, in the past 20 16 years, the global shipment of digital cameras including SLR cameras and compact portable cameras just exceeded 20 million units. The sales of mobile phones with cameras have exceeded1500 million units.

Turn on the phone, open the photo album and see how many photos can be called photography. Maybe most people still have expressions, screenshots and some interesting pictures in their mobile phones.

The excessive fragmentation of picture information makes photography itself lose an innate sense of ceremony.

Every form of photography has its own reason and value. For some people, photography has long since disappeared, while for others, the road to photography has just begun.