It is often said, and I dare say a bit of sleuthing would reveal that I have said it myself, that the quantity of photographs being made and shared today is in some sense desensitizing people to photography. That it is cheapening it.
Is there any evidence of this?
Be careful here, I refer specifically to the "glut of images" the "river of photographs" not the ease of access to the means of production. It is well established that the bottom has dropped out of swathes of the profession, but this is more reasonably attributed to the ubiquity, cheapness, and ease of use of cameras not of photographs.
Yes and no: cameras have become more easy to use (if you don't really understand the medium) and so more pictures are made, largely by chance, that survive the bin.
The quantity of images around has led to the penny-stock genre and business always looks for the easy ways to save money because, to the bean-counter, that's like making it (or is it, sometimes, how
not to make money?). The older generation of guys who worked in advertising was accustomed to sending people away with big budgets and even bigger hopes. That generation has either retired or been put into different management positions and the replacements are probably quite unaware of how it used to be done, and growing up in the ethos of cheap snaps, that's inevitably how they have learned to think.
The move away from print has also removed an important, moderating part of the whole, where price was looked at in an entirely different way. For illustration, I need look no further than my own years in calendar production. Printing a reasonably sized one was very expensive, and the major part of my budget; taking that into consideration, my model, travel and photography charges seemed rather modest, though in reality, both the models and I did very nicely, thank you. Of course, the printers were hit with high paper costs, too, and so the cake had one helluva lot of slices in it, but as a whole, it made everything look proportionate. Anyway, I always quoted as a complete package, but were price ever to be challenged, then a handy breakdown would have made me look modest. My experience was always that people didn't want to know about anything but bottom line, cost either killing the project or giving it the green light.
I suppose that the changes within the communications/advertising world go far beyond just the photography-related ones. Was a time some of us thought the ad agencies milked all of us; today, I think the agencies themselves have a lot of worries ahead of them from the very same democratization of communications.
