Photojournalism is not dying, just growing

So many photojournalists and photographers go online every day and lament the coming ‘death of photography.’ They say that cheap cameras, cheap tricks and lowered expectations are taking potential, and in many cases present, jobs out of their hands. They point to the fact that hardly anyone buys a physical newspaper or physical photographic prints any more as signs that the public is losing interest in photography and photojournalism.

It is all too easy now to find some friend of the family that bought a cheap digital SLR kit and knows how to use its AUTO mode enough to get pictures of the kids or of a wedding. And maybe they are even artistic enough to download a copy of Lightroom so they can apply five sepia-toning filters and vignette the hell out of half the frame. The ubiquitous nature of iPhones and photo-filtering apps is more dramatically pronounced every day. Instagram users take photos of their cupcakes from multiple angles and each one gets tens of ‘likes’ from their online friends. Photography is changing quickly.

But I don’t think it’s anything to weep about.

I think of it like web development and website design over the past few years.

Used to be, no one knew how to make their own website or online presence or, least of all, web application. Now, there are so many tools to build with, you trip over them in every other article in the general online community. But what are people doing with these tools? Are web developers not getting jobs anymore? Does every person that wants a website build their own? No. People make cat memes and sites devoted to cat memes, but for serious shit, they call in the professionals.

The number of websites out there has exploded, but this includes both the number of sites made by amateurs and by professionals. This is because, no matter how easy the tools are to use, no matter how cheap online hosting gets, no matter how low you quote someone for a web design job, people can still tell a professionally designed and conceived website from the amateurs’.

This is how photojournalism, and photography in general, is going to end up. People will learn enough about photography to take cat photos, pictures of their babies, epic sunset shots, etc. But they will still turn back to the professionals when it comes to what’s important. Maybe there will be a dip in photo jobs for a while, when people still think their cameraphones are the shit, but I think we can see how web design has swung back around to the point where everyone wants to hire a web designer to make things look respectable and get people to engage with the product on a more important level. People can tell when something is professionally done. If they can’t, then the professionals aren’t doing much better than the amateurs and can shut up about being cheated out of something. If no one can tell your work, as a professional, from the work of a beginner, then you should not be calling yourself a ‘professional’ in that field.

There is a reason that this sad story of photography written by the pessimists reads like the news industry today. Previously, they had both enjoyed a total monopoly of content delivery to individuals, which was then disrupted by the Internet.

Now, there exists the ubiquitous ability for people and smaller organizations to disseminate their news individually through the blogs and collectives online. These legacy news organizations are suffering, many of them dying, but the idea and concept of news itself is growing and improving, as a whole, in spite of this. More news is available now than there has ever been before. It is easier for someone to be informed on any given topic than anyone has used to its fullest potential.

I believe the same will happen to photography. While things may look grim now for the medium, this is a myopic view. The idea and application of photography is growing exponentially as we watch. We are in the midst of an explosion of photographic appreciation and use. More amateurs are exploring the tools available than ever, but this also means that professionals are being given a chance to distance themselves from the common, low-quality work being produced by the masses.

The photographic medium itself has never been better (it’s not like people are becoming less interested in photography). Professionals need to embrace this fact and grow, themselves, into better examples and applications of photojournalism.