http://www.zadprojects.com/Fade.html
Another scroll experiment.
I want to talk about a realization I had recently about the future of photography. I might ramble a bit so sorry about that.
There is a quote by Lazlo Moholy Nagy that says, "The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the camera as well as the pen”. When I taught I shared this with my students, in my little “hey photography is important too” speech. Moholy-Nagy was a prescient dude, but I don’t think it fully clicked in my balding head how true this statement has become till recently.
My little cousin recently received as a gift an iPod with a built in camera. Just seeing her indifferent attitude towards the built in camera got me thinking wow in a relatively short amount of time we have gone from huge lumbering cameras that only a very small percentage of the population could get their hands, on to a world where cameras are no big deal to a young person because they are in everything. I remember when I was young wishing I could get my hands on a camera, and when I was finally given a small point and shoot it was a big deal. Even then you had to wait for days sometimes weeks if you didn’t have the cash to get your film exposed and returned to you, then all you could do with them is share them with close friends by physically handing it to them. I know you are probably thinking so what blah blah you lived before the internet we get it. But I guess it finally clicked in my head how this will affect future photographers. There will be a whole upcoming generation of photographers to which cameras are no big deal they were raised with them, they took photos and shared them with thousand potentially millions ever since they were 3. I know there has been a lot written about how this changes all sorts of aspects modern culture, it all hit home for me when I saw how my very young cousin used this little camera. What was fascinating was her innate sense of how to use the camera to not just record the world around her but to reflect her inner feelings. She took photos to express here moods, to show how she felt about different things that where going on around her, and her views on her siblings. This blew me away, not that they were super technically awesome or anything but the fact that she was using the camera other than just to document. She also already knew how to alter appearances by using the camera in specific ways. By altering lighting and camera angles she knew it changed the appearance of the subject being photographed. I was like whoa; no one taught her how to do this she just did it. It instantly made me super excited to see what this generation does with photography, especially with whatever technology will be available to them in the next 10 years. I think we haven’t even begun to tap into the potential of photography and the upcoming generation will show us things we could never imagine. So there, that’s my little rambling speech.
