Far more worrisome to me is not the shutting down of the 'Coffee Corner' with respect to politics but that gradual lack of participation and new topics in the technical sections of LuLa. I seldom read the camera reviews as I see no need for new gear but I regularly read and participate on the color management, printer, & LR fora and over the past 2-3 months it appears that activity perceptibly slowed. To me this has been the major value of LuLa and if it disappears there is really not much value in the site (just my opinion obviously and I purchased the excellent technical videos that were done by Michael and Jeff). But this is probably a topic of another thread.
The problem might be - if it exists, and I don't know because I don't pay a heap of attention to that stuff anymore - that people have come to realise that the wonderful promise of digital photography, instant art sales and personal glory beyond words is hype, as much as all those kinds of promises have ever been.
If that's so, and as I say, I can't know - then it is no surprise that those who might have cared, probably coming into digital from film and thus of a certain age and spending power, have realised the dream was just that, and called it a day. It would fit in with falling camera sales, too.
New generations, born to the cellphone camera ethic, will grow to accept its imagery as the standard of excellence, straight from the 'phone, pretty as a picture and instantly fit to send to the rest of the gang doing exactly the same thing. Why would they give a damn about all that stuff about fine art photography? Print quality; somebody
prints? Do they all flock to see Rubens? No, they all flock to look at celebrities on tv - on tv? am I serious? - on the Internet. Times have changed, and culture too. Those who cling to old-fashioned notions of quality are an endagered species with no refuge in sight. One of the last bastions of visible print quality was the glossy magazines; for how much longer can they survive before either vanishing completely or being but a misrable, online shadow of their former glory?
Don't for a moment think it's unique to photography or publishing: look at the local High Street. I was chatting with my daughter today about the gents' tailor shops that would make the suits we teens used to wear at weekends, all the different shoe shops that competed, side-by-side; she'd never heard of them, and on looking the names up on the 'net, was amazed to see how much that was standard is no more. And she was born in the 60s. It's been that rapid. Even the famed dress boutiques of that decade have gone with the wind - who would have ever imagined that a newly-found, democratic freedom for young women to buy cheaply and look great wasn't enough for survival? Anyone really believe the world is going to continue to give a fig about learning photographic techniques and spend the money -
or the time - on the hobby we profess to love? How much time do we, here, really spend on it?
What is there to say about photography online, or in the pub, for that matter? Even as pros, we were hard put to engage in tech talk; we were very keen to talk about photographers we knew or knew about, what they did, who gave them space in which publication, but that was all shop talk. Remove the business from the baby and "what do you got?" Not much. It's obvious here, too, with the gear plateau of today; the good people have nothing new to discuss. No new toys, no conversation, because as I say, what can you say about pictures that means anything to anyone but yourself? We tried to make street into a breath of fesh air, and what happened? In the end, a few snaps, some good, some mediocre and some lousy. What else is to be expected? How good were all the stars 100 percent of the time, and they spent their working lives doing it?
And even with those who spend time writing about photographic technique, how much photography do they actually post? You know, walking the walk etc.
Maybe we just didn't hear the bell tolling. Or the goddam thing is cracked.
