[!@#$%!]

i guess basically what im trying to drive at is that while the issues of representation have long been part and parcel of art making and art criticism, popular photography is now both more pervasive and more influential than ever, but lacks perhaps the same awareness, and carries more power, and with it more danger.

on the one hand everyone can be a citizen journalist—on the other hand everyone is a paparazzo or a colonist claiming possession of whatever is in front of their increasingly sophisticated phone lenses, and perpetuating all manner of social atrocity in their instagrams.

plus the issue of technical seriousness is increasingly moot with things like aspect ratio and composition, value scale and color space and calibration, lens choice and settings and so forth all handled by presets, filters, editors, and incipient AIs that only promise to get better at it.

so in the end as the distance between the rando and the amateur and the pro increasingly diminishes (talent still matters, resources not so much), what we are mostly left with is the relationship between photographer and subject and between photograph and audience (hah, funny word, “audience”, for visual art).

add to that the decentralization of publishing and suddenly everyone is armed to the teeth without even knowing.