Is Photography Dead?

Peter Plagens acknowledges that photography is more wide spread as ever. It's being attacked from an unprecedented amount of angles. However, that is the very thing that is killing it. There is no longer just a photographer and their film camera. No longer a photographer and 24-36 raw shots. Now that photography has become so digitized, it has lost the very thing that made it so remarkable: the uniqueness of an authentic moment.

Photography is no longer "exclusive." It has now fallen victim to the grimy hands of the consumers and has thus become muddled and foreign.

" By 1950, according to Kodak, nearly three quarters of American families owned

cameras and took 2 billion photographs with them. By the 1970s, they were taking 9 billion pictures a year, most of them quick, informal snapshots. "

A photographer named Cindy Sherman is credited to have been the influencing force between the jump from realistic to artistic photography. With digital photography providing so many options and alterations such as animations, CGI, frequency separation, etc, it makes it even harder to capture a respectable/artistically comparable depiction of reality. But if photography is to survive, it must be done.