Before the age of the smartphone, not everyone had cameras and it tookskills and a good eye to capture and create a great photograph. Today, with thehuge range of camera apps on our smartphones, we're all amateur photographers,and pretty good ones at that, since the quality of smartphone images now nearlyequals that of digital cameras.
The new ease of photography has given us a strong desire for capturingthe magical and the ordinary. We are obsessed (痴迷的) with documenting everyday moments, whether it's a shot of ourbreakfast, our cat — or the cat's breakfast.
Cameras are everywhere — a situation that is transforming the way weexperience dramatic events. With cameras observing most urban centers, have wegotten to the point where cameras don't need photographers and photographersdon't even need cameras? When there are political events or natural disasters,it is ordinary citizens with cell phones not photojournalists who often providethe first news images. Quality still matters, but it's less important than what'srelevant and instantly shared.
Before digital images, most people trusted photographs to accuratelyreflect reality. Yet photography has always more stories than we assume. Eachpicture is a result of a series of decisions where to stand, what lens(镜头) to use, what to leave in and out of the frame. Images can also becolored, brightened, faded, and scratched to make photographs more artistic, orto give them an antique look. Such images may be more useful in communicatinghow the people behind the camera felt than in documenting what was actually in frontof the camera.
It's not clear whether this flowering of image making will lead to apublic that better appreciates and understands images or simply numb us to thedeep effects a well-made image can have. But the change is unavoidable. Perhapswe are witnessing the development of a universal visual language, onethat could change the way we relate to each other and the world. Of course, aswith any language, there will be those who produce poetry and those who makeshopping lists.
