Inside Out
"Everyone's a photographer now."
This might be one of the most common responses you get when talking to someone about your photographic practice. And it's true. To use another worn-to-death phrase, the smartphone has democratised photography. That happened a long time ago, but it's continued to accelerate.
Research published by PetaPixel in 2023 reckoned that human beans would take 2.1 trillion photos in 2025, 92.5% of them on the pocket-camera-and-hypermachine-slabs we inexplicably continue to call phones.
Whether the phenomenon is good for photography as an artform can be debated. Picture making is more open and accessible to all than it's ever been, which has to be a good thing. On the flip, the flood of fotografic fodder spewing from everybody's hands — coffees, sunsets, pets — provides a feast of data for the machine overlords whose cold breath is raising goosebumps on our necks. Meta's very business model revolves increasingly around training AI on our pictures, while it recently emerged that even visuals collected by Pokemon Go players may be being used to train models.
So everyone's a photographer now has questionable implications for photography. Sure. Swings and roundies. But putting aside the AI horror show, is the democratisation itself a good thing more generally?
Yes, I think so. And for broader reasons than you might think.
It comes down to the question of what photography is, at a philosophical level. When you make a picture, what are you doing? You are capturing your view on the world. Whether the image is a deeply thought-out landscape frame, a photojournalistic news moment or a like-fishing snap of your morning croissant on an aesthetically pleasing plate, when you publish your picture, you are inviting others to see a glimpse of the world through your eyes. Sure, that glimpse may not be totally authentic. The croissant may be rose-tinted. But it still represents a shared visual experience. On some level, that picture will be imbued with your, very personal, perspective.
Give a dozen people the same subject and a camera, and you will get a dozen different pictures. We all do this thing differently, and our approach is on some level shaped by our unique outlook. Each of us experiences the world around us in a way that is inherently objective, and inherently siloed. There might be some Banksian future where we can step inside someone else's head and look out through their eyes. But for now, each of us peeps out of our own pair of portals and that's that.
So if photography allows us to transfer some sense of that unique perspective — in both the literal and figurative sense of the word — doesn't that have to be a good thing? And the more people that are doing that, the better? This is true of the landscape photographer, sharing their particular relationship with the natural world. This is true of the croissant snapper, posting a smartphone snap of their retweetable eatable. But it's especially true of the political photographer, whose work is inevitably shaped — consciously or un — by their particular outlook.
Pictures still have a great power to tell stories that words just can't. I think that's because they transfer an organic experience directly from one mind to another. Language is constructed, and therefore constricted, but images are intrinsic. They are a near-raw representation of experience. They carry nuances and subtleties that lie beyond words, communicating one-to-one without intermediary. When we look at somebody's picture, we are stepping inside their head, and looking out. So everyone's a photographer now. And perhaps it brings the islands that we are, just a little closer together.
Islands in the stream... That is what we are... [fade to black]