I have a friend who is both a major gallery owner and a major collector. He thinks that digital has been a relatively negative influence on photography.
I wholeheartedly agree. For a few reasons.
• Commitment. When you had to lug around a Mamiya RZ67 (or larger) to consider yourself a professional, you were making a commitment. Nowadays (my old man word), you read blog posts by well-known Interweb Picture Gods where they trumpet their ability to do 'professional' assignments with a m 4/3 camera... or smaller sensor. They feel 'enabled' to do their business with gear that fits in a fanny pack, and emit wails of oppression if anyone asserts they should be using larger formats.
• Singularity. re: Fashion Photography.... Up through the 90s, you could pick up an issue of Vogue or Bazaar, point to a ad or an editorial image, and easily recognize even a single photograph as having come from a certain photographer. Each of them had a very distinctive signature, resulting from an individual combination of lens, film, and lighting. Nowadays, they all shoot with a Hasselblad H-something, and files are processed by some guy in a dark room — and that guy probably works on files from a bunch of different high-end shooters. There's a sameness, and a decided lack of character.
• "Volume" is not the problem. Fashion/Commercial photographers have always shot a LOT of film. And, people your friend might be exhibiting are not likely to be amateurs who just spray and hope to get lucky. It's a technical issue — digital is bland, inherently, and attempts to 'liven it up' too often result in tackiness, because not enough people really have 'good taste.' In fact, outside of fashion photographers, you rarely find a photographer with good taste, and if you're asking him to concoct a 'signature,' from scratch, from a base digital file, you're asking for trouble.
• Digital is disposable. Even when we use and 'love' digital, we don't cling to its products like we do to 'physical' media. I still have casual snapshot Kodachromes that i shot in 1980 as a 13 year old that i value more than files from the 5DMkII i used to have. Not because the 'photography' was better, but because they're real and tangible and sorta magical in the way with which they interact with light. What's a better experience? Opening one of those old plastic boxes of a stack of Ektachromes, or opening a folder of JPGs? The latter is easier. The former is more compelling.
• "Snobbery." If i visit a gallery with the intent of buying photographs, i will have almost no interest in purchasing anything other than a traditional print. I have only the beginnings of a collection at this point, but going forward, that's almost a criteria for the endeavor. I'm not concerned with claims that digital prints can be/are better than analog. I started in photograph pre-digital, so that's the standard. A bias, for sure. If analog had come about after digital, as an alternative way of making images, i might have a different viewpoint. But, ALL of the photographers i admire/worship have been FILM photographers, and i have not found any digital photographers that interest me. Even the classic guys who used to shoot film and have transitioned to digital seem to have 'lost' their appeal. McCurry, Harvey, Gibson, etc.... I haven't liked anything they now do, and not just because i'm disinclined to. The character of their previous imagery is what i loved, and i don't see it now.
• Numbers. Digital makes the process democratic. It enables a lot of people to turn out a lot of work, and so we have to sort through a lot more chaff than before. That's both frustrating and lends the impression that there is so much more bad work now. Percentage-wise, maybe not - i dunno. But, perceptually so, for sure.
