Does Photography really means anything to anyone in the digital age ?

by Yvette Depaepe
Published the 19th of June 2020

Since the digital age and smartphone photography, the Art can be accessed by anyone at anytime. Without much thought, we can grab our cameras and rattle off pictures at a furious pace, and then share them with the world in seconds.

But how much do we care about the photos we're taking?
Do they really mean anything to us?
Do we really care about other digital images we see on a daily basis?

But here on 1x, all photos mean a lot to us and are picked out carefully by a team of curators to preserve the high photographic quality.

'Art Gallery' by Babak Haghi

Each and every year people take over one trillion photos, collectively.
This amount is expected to grow by 100 billion photos every year.
That’s just insane.

Cameras and photography are accessible to billions of people in every corner of the planet, but the ability to overindulge in what used to be an art form that was not as easy to access has had some negative effects.

The digital age has enabled us to take photos of literally everything. But has the process of photography become so accessible that it's cheapened the value of the art? Most people in this world do not care about images, and most people don't value photography or the power of a photograph. Many images are stored on our devices, or in the cloud, and there they will sit for eternity, or until we run out of storage space.

The value in photography comes from the emotions that great photos can cause, and we just don’t get that very much in the digital age because digital images come and go in the blink of an eye !

We've no need to be careful with our shots, because now we have SD cards that can hold thousand of images and not just the 24 or 36 on the analogue film rolls.

Digital photography is for the many, which is both a blessing and a curse. It's easy to see why average people don’t value photography and photographs as much as in the past.

I remember back when we shot film; every image had to count, every photo had to be shot with intent, and man it was infuriating when you knew you just blew an exposure on your roll of film. We need to get back to thinking that way.

If we have a quick look on our hard drives, we will be amazed how many images are stored in the digital realm for no reason.

Photography in the digital age has become devalued to a disturbingly low level. Photography is abused to the point that real works of art are seldom seen publicly. One more reason why 1x is such a valuable photo site.

The true value in photography comes from the emotions that great photos can cause, that's why only the best are picked out here on 1x to show them to the world, to those who really still care about photography in its pure Art form.

There is so much talent here that it was hard to compose a gallery.
But all are outstanding and contain so many emotions, may it be happiness, sorrow, originality, amazement and more.
Whatever the category they belong to, I hope you'll enjoy...
Respect and congratulations to all the authors.

'I was here a long time and looked' by Herbert Reinecke