In January 2004, Kodak announced it would stop making film cameras. Faced with the reality that film was rapidly being pushed aside by digital technologies, George Eastman’s company was in turmoil. In fact, in the first years of the new century, the firm cut more than 22,000 jobs.
For Kodak, the writing had been on the wall for some time as digital cameras were already outselling their cousins in film by leaps and bounds. In 2003, more than 50 million digital cameras were sold, an increase of 64 percent from the previous year.
Today, the digital camera market is flattening out. As the market becomes increasingly saturated with product, digital camera sales are predicted to peak at 111 million by 2009. Nevertheless, there seems to be no turning back. More than a century earlier, George Eastman, Kodak’s founder, dreamed of making photography an “everyday affair.” Consider Eastman’s surprise at how much photography has changed since the day he hit the street promoting his Kodak One to the public.
The introduction of the digital camera has changed how people act in front of and behind the lens. The act of reviewing the picture immediately after capture, similar to the affect Edwin Land’s Polaroid, alters the interpersonal dynamic between subject and photographer significantly.
The time of Eastman’s “everyday affair” has come in an age of instant everything. Digital photography is making how people communicate cheaper, faster and easier than ever.
The immediacy of digital photography has several advantages over older technologies beyond speed and cost. The digital photography allows people to be more productive, feel more creatively empowered, and to develop greater levels of social interaction than previously experienced with older technologies.
Digital photography has a democratizing impact in that ultimately increases social and empathic interactions, greater productivity, and creative empowerment. At the same time, the seamless and malleable nature of the digital format raises, once again, concerns about the authenticity and veracity of the image.
From a social psychological perspective, thanks to digital technologies, human visual behavior in the age of instant becomes a fascinating and ever changing challenge.
Increasingly, for many of us, the world in which we live has been defined not only through our direct experience with it, but also through the pictures we carry in our heads about it. Advertising images, television, still pictures, and now just about everything about Internet, provide us with a relentless stream of mediated visual messages.
Young people now experience the world radically different from their ancestors. Growing up in the age of instant means that people learn about themselves predominantly through the likenesses and representations created by others.
The images we see in print or on a screen map a world view, construct and define desires and fears, create self and group identity, promote societal likes and dislikes, and promulgate a collective memory.
On the day we dropped our toddler off at daycare for the first time we included a tiny book of family photographs. Feeling guilty that day for having to leave our child with strangers, we believed that the pictures would be a consoling influence for her throughout the day.
In grocery store we avoid the cereal aisle knowing well that the brightest, most colorful, and most seductive boxes of cereal, designed to attract the attention of little ones, are always placed on the lowest shelves for easy viewing. Pictures, as a form of persuasive communication, inform, shock, terrify, tease, inspire, entertain, teach, seduce, and console us emotionally and intellectually.
“We thus live in an era in which it is difficult to conceive of even a single human activity that does not use photography, or at least provide an opportunity for it to be deployed in the past, present or future.”
Ariella Azoulay, (2005). The Ethic of the Spectator: The Citizenry of Photography. After Image: 33
What is unique about the photograph is the almost instant capacity to substantiate our experiences, and by extension, our very existence in time and place. The only problem now is that in a world already saturated with images, we continue to produce more and more of them. If cultures are shaped through ritual and routine, then, images play a significant role in process as an on-going medium of recollection.