Josh+R’s+OpEd+Article

= ---The State of Modern Photography--- =

= =  And How it Relates with our Digital Lives-- Photography is a rapidly changing medium of expression and art through a simple, frozen snippet of time. Before, only a choice few were the ones with the bulky film cameras that were nowhere near as sophisticated and compact as the ones we have now; in fact, a large majority, if not all, have some sort of camera in their possession, whether it be in the form of a smartphone or a DSLR.

This rapid growth in the amount of cameras in our lives have dumb-downed photography. We upload millions of photos each year, almost billions through social media mediums such as Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat, but sadly, a lot of these photos are just “selfies” or pictures of food or even that stereotypical sunset picture that is way too dark.

I don’t hate the selfies and food pictures flung onto social media, but it just hurts to see that most of our photography in the world has been devolved to pictures of things that wouldn’t strike someone as beautiful or emotional, which is two things art should do; photography has fallen out of the artsy side, and is stuck in the Hey-look-at-how-great-my-life-is side.

Meaningful photography still exists, but it is being drowned in a sea of “material” photos.

At the same time, our lives have never been more connected, in both good ways and bad ways.

A while ago, I stumbled across an article on The Verge( Which by the way, is an amazing publication) It explained the revolutionary power of smartphones on photography, and the one thing that struck me most was this line: YOUR EQUIPMENT NO LONGER DEFINES YOU, YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS DO Truer words have never been said. Today it doesn't matter what DSLR you have or what lens you have, if you take a bad photo with your expensive gear, it's still a bad photo. Today, phones are catching up to DSLR, minus the power of zoom lenses, for now. it doesn't matter how megapixels your DSLR has, because really 5 is all you need to get photos high quality enough to view on HD screens. So while this change did dumb photography down, it made photos more abundant, accessible, and available for the general population.

To sum things up, the recent boom in photography caused the explosion of photos through social media although it has dumbed it down quite a bit, but in the end, now throngs of people have access to the medium.