Now I'm beginning to understand why User Critiques has degenerated into "I was there," and "Here's a picture of my cat." Slobodan's excellent catch has been on here for two days and only two of us have reacted to it. Photography is an art form, except when it isn't -- which seems to be most of the time.
Russ, there's photography and photographers; they are not the same things.
Photographers have, by and large, thrown themselves off that cliff as somebody in the article suggested they might have to do.
I'm currently working harder than I ever did when I was still 'working' as a photographer. I have a self-imposed 'project' that's got me at the bloody computer until past midnight most recent nights, and some days I think it's going wonderfully and the next I want to pull it down and walk away. That might be senile decay, the onset of mental polarity, but whatever it is, it's total. I don't really recommend it. But I can't help it.
The problem with all clubs and chatsites is this: people end up chatting and not doing, or doing a lot of crap just to have something to post. It leads nowhere, and pretty much all I see here these days is formulaic. Volume seldom equates with value. Worse, one starts to see that those rare creatures capable of a constant output of great work are the exceptions; they also have earned the right to access, and in many spheres that's key, without which you'll never get in, and may just as well go to the couch and watch tv.
An example of the truth of the above can be seen in the link I posted to Peter Lindbergh, yesterday. The world he 'creates' he doesn't create: it exists for him for perhaps a morning or a day, made by all the contributing talents without which he'd be just another lonely soul looking for its function. None of us can make it in a vacuum. Most of us, photographically speaking, are in free fall within our personal vacuum.
That's why you see what you see, and there's no solution.
Rob