“‘Today everything exists to end in a photograph,’ Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal 1977 book ‘On Photography.’ This was something I thought about when I recently read that Google was making its one-hundred-and-forty-nine-dollar photo-editing suite, the Google Nik Collection, free.”
“‘The definition of photography is changing, too, and becoming more of a language,’ the Brooklyn-based artist and professional photographer Joshua Allen Harris told me. ‘We’re attaching imagery to tweets or text messages, almost like a period at the end of a sentence. It’s enhancing our communication in a whole new way.’ As a result, photos are less markers of memories than they are Web-browser bookmarks for our lives...Today we think of something, and then we Google it. Photos are evolving along the same path as well.”
With the proliferation of cameras in modern smartphones, tablets, laptops and more, digital photography has entered the cultural mainstream. Many of us reflexively take selfies during travel and pose for memorable moments with loved ones. In 2016, Om Malik of The New Yorker wrote an article entitled "In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look At Nothing," examining at our photographic tendencies and how the abundance of imagery has altered our relationship to it and to our memories. How do photographs become placeholders for memory? Why do we rely so heavily on imagery to capture and enrich narrative? How might we be missing out on lived experiences because of the cultural capital placed upon pictures?
