When Photos Stop Being Pictures
A recent article by Caitlin McDevitt in the Washington Post, describing Facebook’s expanding role as a hub for digital photography, while providing some surprising facts, raises one particularly interesting issue. As more people post and share images online, it turns out that the numbers of images being printed out onto paper is shrinking. According to a research study by IDC (International Data Corporation), a market research firm, an estimated 42 billion photos will be printed out, commercially or in people’s homes, in 2013. That might sounds like a lot of pictures, but it’s about a third less that were printed out in 2008 (a year in which, according to industry analyst Steve Hoffenberg in the piece he wrote for click! photography changes everything half a trillion photographs were taken.
These numbers remind us that the way we like to look at and use photographs is changing radically. The glossy borderless prints people wedged into their wallets, put up on their refrigerator doors, filed away shoeboxes, or displayed in frames are fast becoming relics. As the number of digital images we make soar, the amount of time we’re interested in spending with any single one of them is likely to decrease.
According to the Photo Marketing Association, almost 40 percent of households with digital cameras no longer print out their pictures. If you’re in the photo-processing business, that’s bad news. But what does this mean to the rest of us? Is it becoming part of our human and digital nature to want to see as many different images as quickly as we can?
The Post article points out that 65% of people online use Facebook to share images—that’s 400 million users uploading 3 billion photos every month. To handle and store all those images, Facebook decreases their resolution to a point where, that if you wanted to make a 5x7 inch print of one of them—let’s say you lost your camera and never backed up your photos—you’d only get a blurry version of it. My question is, is that a problem? Do we look at and respond to images online or onscreen differently than we do to images printed out on paper?
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It is not a suprise to my generation that printed pictures is decreasing, but to my parents generation they still don't get it. Even upon my return from Maui I emailed my mother some pictures, she asked why I didn't just get them developed on paper and mail them. In response to your question about responding to images online differently, I believe we do. There is still something more powerful about seeing an image printed on paper, then seeing it online. For me a great example was going to Hawaii. I had been looking at pictures online for week previous, but nothing can prepare you for seeing something in real life.
Wow this is a can of worms. I am not so concerned that people could lose images - people should get wise and back up. However I am wary of the bigger picture. The physicality, the holding of a photography or the picking up of a photo frame with a photo in it is an extremely different experience to viewing them on a 2D screen or monitor. The holding of a photograph allows you to literally and meorphorially hold a moment past. This tactility very much conjures different emotions within us that allows us to bond if you like with reality and the subject matter. On a screen we are removed it has been argued that we are removed from this. It is a massive subject to dive into. Susan Sontag has written many books on photography. Her book entitled 'On Photography' strangely enough is one I want to particularly mention here as she discuss the profound changes the photographic images has encountered as a result of the onset of digital. In this essay she speaks and refers to photographs as 'memento mori'. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability and mutability. This in itself is interesting enough yet I feel there is a deeper concept. The deeper notions to me are about the death of the photograph and the death of the memories. In the age of digital we can and do delete the less perfect images before they even hit our 2D screen or monitor. The blurry images, the images that are 1/2 hidden by a thumb are removed because they are not perfect - substandard. The photographs are dead. The photographs are destroyed, lost and gone forever. It is my belief that in years to come it is those very images that are important. I have many photographs that I have taken with a film camera that are less than perfect, that are blurry and I have got photos of half a thumb. Yet they are physical photographs that I treasure - they still show the people & the places I care about. They are a mark of that time and place albeit they are flawed. Or maybe digital will change us and simply make us less sentimental? Could it have an impact on our ways of seeing and feeling? Maybe the generations born in this era with change emotionally and their responses to the 2D imagery will equal that of those whom have experience with the developed photograph? Really this is a can of worms and maybe only time will tell.
This article is very realistic. I don't print pictures anymore. I store them in my computer and upload them to Facebook or Picassa. On the other hand, my parents (in their sixties), prefer printing every single picture.
Rachel, clearly you have more storage space than I do. I just don't have room to keep every single photo I ever took. All those physical photos we took in the 1990s, when my boys were little, are shoved in shoeboxes somewhere in the basement. I haven't seen them in probably six years. Even the ones that made it into scrapbooks and albums just sit on the shelf. The digital photos, archived and indexed on iPhoto, are used constantly. They are shared more, in more ways and for more reasons (school projects, greeting cards, presentations, sharing with grandma) than the physical photos were, or are. I actually prefer getting digital photos of friends and family. I'm interested to see them. But I really don't want to keep their photos around forever and I feel funny about throwing other people's children away.
What an interesting discussion this is turning into. I'm interested in a comment Rachel made, when she wondered out loud whether digital imagery--with our ability to manipulate images, and their lack of materiality (the fact that there's literally nothing to hold on to)--might make us less sentimental in the ways we make, use and respond to photographic images in the future. Do we look at photographs of ourselves and our lives differently now that we've gone digital? Are we more critical of them? Less surprised by them? Less attached to them?
Digital photography has had a profound affect on how we use our photos and if we choose to print them out at all. Being part owner in a photography and wedding company we provide customers with digital negatives and we have seen a drastic decrease in printing over the years, but the personal use of the photos on Facebook is astounding. It seems that people are only printing a highlight real of photos compared with when they were forced to commit to developing all the photos or none.
From an environmental standpoint digital photography is great because you don't have to develop and print 36 photos just to get the 7 good ones you will cherish forever.
Wow, what an interesting discussion!
As a photographer, I'm aware of this trend. And it's affecting not just the photo printing industry, but the profession of photography as well. I'm told that the latest iPhone has all the characteristics that semi-pro SLR cameras had 5 years ago - aperture control, shutter speed, high resolution.
When that iPhone is connected to Facebook the question comes up - who needs printing? And who needs professional photographers? Some suggested that both those industries are on the brink of extinction.
But I think something is being missed.
There are two types of photos. First, there are snapshots which say something like "this is me in front of Sydney Opera House".
And then there are photographs which communicate so much more. The latter type tell a story; they communicate emotion and feel. They provoke. They draw you in. They leave you trying to answer questions - "what really happened?" "why?"
I think this trend is not so much an extinction of photography as much as polarisation. Facebook, iPhone et al are carrying a huge market share of the "snapshots".
But there will always be a market segment of photographs which are printed; they are something more than just "snapshots". They are the ones usually hung on walls and cherished in physical form. They're the photos taken by people who want to tell a story with a photograph.
They're more art than a picture. And I think those kinds of photos are here to stay; they are not affected by the trends on Facebook.
Steven
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