Some thoughts for today from Joe Farace
paradigm shift—a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions.
In 1897, Mark Twain reportedly said, “the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” He passed away in 1910. Artist Paul Delaroche, upon seeing a Daguerreotype for the first time in 1839 said, “from today, painting is dead!” Please don’t tell moderns artists along with the galleries and museums that are exhibiting or selling their work about that one.
We are at a point in photography’s history where some on-line pundits are now saying, “photography is dead.” You see, paradigm shifts are hard for some people to deal with so they make up stuff like this. Factoid: The invention of the automobile would seem to contribute to the demise of the use of horses, yet there are more horses alive today then there were at the time of the civil war.
Instead, what we are seeing is a paradigm shift aka a fundamental change in approach with underlying assumptions that appears to be a confluence of digital and film photography along with societal changes. We are/were in a time with young people are running around snapping selfies with their cell phones and calling them photographs, while those of us who not only still remember film but are still shooting it, see those fleeting images on smartphones as merely pictures of the self-absorbed.
How I Made this Photo: While the above photo was not made today, this is what the scene at O’Brien Park in Parker, Colorado probably looks like today after several days here of freezing temperatures and snow here on Daisy Hill. The camera used was a Canon EOS 80D with EF-S18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens (at 19mm.) Exposure was 1/500 sec at f/5 and ISO 400. Image was enhanced using the Vivenza Photoshop-compatible plug-in.
Not too long ago, a Camera & Imaging Products Association’s (CIPA) analysis of photographic trends stated, “Cameras are for older people.” They claimed that people who still interested in photography were “typically around the ages of 40-60 or more” and their children and grandchildren are “far less interested in cameras and prefer to use their smartphones.” Yet if you take a look at my video The Pros & Cons of Film Photography or better yet take a look around YouTube and see the many young people making videos about film photography, you’ll realize that this statement is, at best, misguided,
That’s why you can see a growing trend of more and more young people shooting film cameras. This trend, while it may have begun by hipsters who embraced the seemingly cyberpunk aspects of film photography it quickly expanded to include young people who didn’t want to shoot the same kind of cameras as their parents and now seems to be rapidly growing to include many other kinds of shooters of all ages across a wide spectrum of society.
As Groucho Max once famously observed, ”what are you gong to be believe? What I tell you or your own eyes.” My eyes tell me that at many of the cars shows I attend, I see many young people with DSLRs or mirrorless cameras making photographs, just like the kid seen above. Some are using cell phones, for sure, but there a surprising number of digital and even some film cameras being used. At the last Cars & Coffee Cliff and I attended we talked with a young man who was shooting with a Leica M3 that he bought from Japan.
Photography, as we know it, is clearly not dead but is certainly changing as anything does over time and personally I don’t think the dust has settled yet. What’s coming? I don’t know, my Magic 8 Ball says, “Reply hazy try again.”
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Along with photographer Barry Staver, Joe is co-author of Better Available Light Digital Photography with new copies are available from Amazon for $21.50 with used copies selling around five bucks. For some reason, the Kindle price varies.