Sunday, November 22, 2009

Digital Crayola

I just read this article on the future of photography on PopPhoto on how photography will look like in 2006.

The author goes into every possible hi-tech gadget possibility, ranging from photo-gloves and eye implants. In my personal opinion the article looks, in the best case like a 3-D visual effect sensationalist Sci-Fi with a crappy storyline, sometimes childish.

It totally misses the point of photography as an expression -and I am presuming you are on my side of the discussion on whether photography is art-. If you reduce photography to its simple, snapshot-taking, everyday-event-documenting simplicity, the article might be somewhat on target on predicting the future.

If we are going to be so evolved by 2060, Why not think about a world that is constantly surveyed by hi res cameras and every inch of our existence is documented by automatic picture-takers? We could then get any possible picture just by downloading the image from a giant "world-stock" database, making any gadget absolutely pointless.

With all due respect to the never-to-be-released-cool-factor-technology-creating (remember the 3-D manipulator? or the Human-face-shaped CRTs for video conferencing?) guys at the Media Lab at MIT, having a photograph that can be modified by the viewer depending on the mood he is in, well...that is so 1960s...I used to do it in pre-K....with crayola. While it can be fun, it is also insulting for someone who is intending to express a message and a mood and somebody is "interpreting it" differently. I know a lot of people who would be upset if I did this just with one of their phrases, let alone admiring the "guernica" and "interpreting it" as a bachelor's party.

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