In an e-mail recently another photographer took me to task for showing work that I'd done in years past. I understand the fascination with new gear and all things digital but photography didn't just start in 2003 or whenever it was that Canon introduced the D30 and Nikon introduced the D100. Nope. Many people were taking photographs even earlier than that. And we're not anxious to relegate everything that we did before last year to the deep archives.
In fact, if you look at the work of Robert Frank in, The Americans
Why else would the Beatles and the Rollingstones still be relevant? Why else would Robert Frank, Henri Cartier Bresson
I'm not saying that this snapshot I took of Ben, with a Contax G2 and a 45mm lens, on Tri-x film
Argue all you want but today's carbon fiber cellos and violins don't compete with the instruments made over a century ago by Stradivarius and today's frenetic lighting geeks don't hold a candle to the work done by men of their grandfather's generation. Sure, there will be exceptions that people will put forward, but it's almost as if we're in the middle of a de-evolution of photography, which is braced up and given credence by the ease with which the masses can achieve technical proficiency.
I've said it before and I'll repeat it here, crowd sourcing art on a grand scale, with an inexhaustible feedback loop, serves to homogenize vision and rationalize a pervasive complicity wherein everyone copies everyone else to gain a universal sense of approval. That's why each day's "style of the day" goes viral by the end of the day. The quote from Dash, in the movie, The Incredibles, says it best, "When everyone is special, no one is...." (paraphrased).
If you are an Ayn Randian you've come to know that phrase as being the distillation of 1100 pages of, Atlas Shrugged
Am I saying that nothing new can be done and that we should close the patent office? Of course not, but while I am being hyperbolic I do believe we could move the game forward by sharing less on a day to day basis while working diligently on subjects and points of review that are more organic to ourselves and less affected by the overwhelming momentum of narcissistic oversharing. Just a thought.