Wim Wenders: Phones Have Made Photography ‘More Dead Than Ever’

Your camera doesn't matter, because if you're the right person you'd treat your photos with equal respect, be it taken with a cell phone or a Hasselblad. Your camera does matter, because if you're not paying attention, the only difference you'd make is the difference between your gears...

I don't get this "photography is dead because there's too much of it". How much is too much?

The photograph is not unique in natural. Photography had, and will always be about reproduction since collodian took over - in fact it overcame the daguerreotype mainly due to it being easily duplicated. The world had been flooded with, and drawn in images for over 150 years. Mechenical, industrial, material, that's the evil box we call the camera. The cell phone is but an extension of the old concept that had "tainted" the visual world. We're shaped by the trivial, by birth. Shall we go back to the middle age to make it sacred again?
 
Bob Michaels said:
I am still trying to get my head around all of those who are worried about the photos other people take, how many they take, what they do with them, or the public perception of what "photography" is.

Step back and consider that photography is a means of expressing one's own personal vision and has nothing to do with anyone else.
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I would completely agree with you Bob, except for the local art students who want my stuff. They think, they have a lot of say in what I do with my work, as everything is shared and free today, in their view.

And i 'm not sharing.
 
"I know from experience that the less you have, the more creative you have to become"

I approve of this message.

I remember a recent blog post by Steve Huff (he has a popular website) where he claimed that every new/improved camera made him a better photographer, because the better the camera, the better the photographer... of course there would then be a paid link to where you could buy that new camera from.

I actually love people taking photos with iphones. It makes them appreciate film photos much more and turns them into my customers.
 
DougFord said:
...old man yells at cloud.
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I was looking at a way to succinctly express what I was thinking, and you already had. I can appreciate that he's trying to market his product or whatever, so he's making statements to arouse interest, but if you're like me you're tired of hearing the same old saws about photography.

Apparently Wenders has never heard of Instagram, or realised that people don't print anymore simply because they don't have to. The general public didn't sit around staring at negatives on light tables, they wanted to see the end results.
 
Don't bother me Wim, I'm happily taking snaps of the family and friends, developing and printing a 4x6 or 5x7 and enjoying the giggles when I give them away.
So much fun.
 
mich rassena said:
“The trouble with iPhone pictures is nobody sees them,” Wenders says. “Even the people who take them don’t look at them anymore, and they certainly don’t make prints.”

And even though phones are getting loaded with more and more features and filters, they may not be helping people become creative photographers.

“I know from experience that the less you have, the more creative you have to become,” the photographer notes..
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So is the iPhone too much camera or not enough? I find it a bit limiting myself, shouldn't that make me more creative? And it's a known fact that the first years of photography were the most creative, right? The photographers had nothing but a light tight box, mixed their own chemicals, made their own plates, used their hats for a shutter.

It should be quite obvious that entire genres of photography simply didn't exist until cameras became capable of being used in new ways, materials became less expensive and mass produced, cameras more portable, more automated, easier, more not less.

Maybe there's a grain of truth in there somewhere, that we're forced to think creatively to make up for what we're unable to obtain otherwise. I'm all for the sprit of invention, but I can't argue that some things are best gotten off the shelf so that one can work on their vision.
 
ptpdprinter said:
When was the last time you pressed the shutter button and didn’t look at the resulting image. Doesn’t happen. It hyperbole. It is not the problem in our times for photography. What's the problem: people bickering about film vs. digital instead of making photographs. Photography is not a zero sum game. Making up new names is just yelling get off my lawn. The province of tired old men.
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If you play the cards right, one can criticize people for both "never looking at images" and "chimping". That way you can get them coming and going. And I wonder about the "old men" thing, I see that a bit, but I'm coming around to the idea that it's a personality type, maybe more prevalent in old men as a necessary component of getting that far along in life.
 
Bob Michaels said:
Meanwhile, many of us are too busy making our own idea of photographs to worry about what people with smartphones are doing. They sure have no impact on me or my photography.
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I agree, but it could have an impact on how an audience might view or value your photography.
 
First, this is a petapixel article, so give it the attention that it deserves.

Second, people have been saying this about digital for what, decades? So he's a little late to the ballgame on "the end of photography" mantra.

If anything, the phones are a big improvement on picture visibility compared to a digital camera. You can show the photo to others on the smartphone screen a lot easier than on a digital camera, and you can send the photo to a printer, an online forum, or someone's email address in no time at all. I use mine all the time for photos and photo sharing and it's a lot of fun.

However, passing around a smart phone is not the same as pulling out some prints and giving them to someone to look at. As many digital shooters don't print their photos, a film camera's prints are still special. No more special that a digital camera's prints, it's just that the film shooter is more likely to hand you some prints. Nothing beats that.
 
mich rassena said:
And I wonder about the "old men" thing, I see that a bit, but I'm coming around to the idea that it's a personality type, maybe more prevalent in old men as a necessary component of getting that far along in life.
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Being resistant to change and intolerant is not age specific, but it does perhaps affect the elderly disproportionately. You don't see too many young people crying photography is dead.
 
Steve M. said:
First, this is a petapixel article, so give it the attention that it deserves.
.
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Why are you taking a shot at PetaPixel? Please correct me if i'm wrong.

The story came from Michael Zhang. Michael is co founder/owner of PetaPixel. I figure you don't like his site. No problem. But, having helped him when he first got PetaPixel up, I feel obligated to defend him as a journalist and business owner. To my knowledge, Michael has never published anything that wasn't properly vetted. If a mistake was made (I've only seen one in five years) a correction was forthcoming.. on the front page load. Not hidden behind some ADs on page 12, as seen often with the NYT, WaPo, and others.

PetaPixel is a business. He needs clicks / money to exist. But, he's an honorable publisher of photo news.

As a Journalist of photography news/info, he was the first to publish several stories on photo fraud that went Main Stream Media.

Just my view.. pkr
 
I do miss the pre-digital days because film was relatively expensive, so there were fewer crap photos that people showed me. With digital the sky is the limit!
 
RObert Budding said:
I do miss the pre-digital days because film was relatively expensive, so there were fewer crap photos that people showed me. With digital the sky is the limit!
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Yes, there were certainly fewer people walking around with an envelope of prints they just got back from Moto-Photo than there are people with cellphones today. I would wager that more images are in focus today though.
 
Steve M. said:
However, passing around a smart phone is not the same as pulling out some prints and giving them to someone to look at. As many digital shooters don't print their photos, a film camera's prints are still special. No more special that a digital camera's prints, it's just that the film shooter is more likely to hand you some prints. Nothing beats that.
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This is a funny thing I've found: with my friends, pretty much all middle-aged / cusp of pensionerhood, they actually seem to prefer my photos displayed on my phone. They will happily flick through an album, pinching to zoom, scrolling back and forth, then passing it to the next friend at the table. These are scanned film photos. I once brought them a stack of prints (postcard size from the digi-booth) and they only looked cursorily at them.
On the hand, with my young daughters, they much prefer prints, whether of digital files or film, and will pore over them for a long time.
 
David Hughes said:
And when photography was invented didn't someone say that from then on art was dead?

Anyway, I never knew that photography was about producing a masterpiece. A lot of us use photography as a sort of personal notebook.

Regards, David
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This is well said and true but still misses the point. The smartphone reflects a kind of totality ( a so-called "virtual" world) that dulls the potential for human perception. It dulls the self -I posing a threat to our capacity create a "personal notebook" just as "unconfirmed" crappy smartphone videos have degraded journalism on BBC. We don't know what we are watching, it is poorly done and we can hardly know what it means - its not a record of anything. Therefore the smartphone competes with photography's capacity to document - and like all competition the base has a tendency to drive out the dear. Comment above by Keith about the wider threat the sp poses to the capacity for human decision making is also correct.
 
jsrockit said:
No, instead they insist that everyone's a photographer now because it is easy. :bang:
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Anyone who makes photographs can call themselves a photographer. The perennial question, even in films days, is whether you are any good at it. As with many things, most people aren't.
 
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