The Intentionality is gone: The Tidal Shift away from Photographing Memories [Digital Cameras, Photography and The Implications Part I]

With the forecast

...that over 800 million camera phones will be sold worldwide between 2003 and 2008 (market research firm Strategy Analytics),

...that camera phones are going to replace low- and mid-sized comsumer digicams ("Sony has already ceded the low-end digital camera market to camera phones", see below)

...that 2 Mpixel phones appear early next year and 5 Mpixel versions after them (Link)

...that 312 billion digital images a year will be captured, stored or shared in 2008 (Gregg Patterson, a vice president in HP's printing and imaging division; Link)

...that thus consequently more image will be published to the web and (that´s what companies in the background like Kodak, CeWeColor et.al. are hoping) more images will be printed on real photo paper

and the belief

that analog photography deals mainly with the capturing and digital photography with the recording of what is said to be life and reality

what happens in the end to - photography?


Douglas Rushkoff wonders in Photographs and Memories at The Feature that "our evolution from digital cameras to camera phones" endangers "the way in which we relate to images, the memories they evoke, and perhaps even history itself."

Having gone all the way from analog photography to the digital photo era (and he feels to have lost the quality in his photographs, the value, the memory and the meaning) he wonders "instead of elevating the events in our lives to ´memories` as we did in the Kodak era, we are simply grabbing some visual data points or a momentary sensation. The intentionality is gone. And unless the image is spectacular (not in execution, but in its content) we'll trash it without printing. Who can be bothered filing all those little jpegs?"

He concludes: "As photography becomes less time-consuming, less crafted, less intentional, and less expressed through physically realized artifacts, it will lose its ability to elevate the moments and subjects its captures. Just as monarchs established their nobility through time-consuming portraiture (for which they, themselves, were required to sit), people with film cameras could sanctify their loved ones, and - perhaps more importantly - measure and even control the passage of time by subjecting the moment to a carefully organized and meticulously processed exposure.

The immense popularity of the cameraphone may ultimately signal - like the ascendance of reality TV - a victory of content over art, or message over medium. Sure, we'll get a whole lot more well-documented car crashes. But our experience of photography may be reduced from moments of inspired awe to ephemeral voyeuristic gaping."

There is an ongoing discussion.