Anyone who has known me very long probably knows what my thoughts are regarding the digital revolution in photography and how it has affected the working professional like me. In a nutshell, the glut of digital cameras and camera phones has degraded the worth of the professional photographer, not just from the quality perspective, but also from the radically increased volume of images that are available in the public domain.  

It takes a tremendous amount of erudition, field training, practice and more practice to learn to produce quality images for public consumption. Literally decades of experience has gone into my personal quest to capture the images I display. I take what I do seriously and fully appreciate that when I see the images I have taken that the time that went into each photograph was time well spent. It still gives me great pleasure. It used to provide a decent living.

Recently, I ran across an article in Forbes Magazine's online edition that looked at this in a slightly different light. The author is named Todd Essig.  He writes about “a quiet war between the music played at a live concert venue and Steve Jobs’ Smartphone legacy.” In a nutshell, he says that the idea of being in the moment and being part of the experience of hearing music has been superseded by the technology of being able to share with the world by using our “smart” devices.

“When you document rather than fully experience a moment you block your own access to the depths of feeling, memory, and yearning the moment offers. You may think you are augmenting reality. You are not. You are degrading the experience.”

I know this as a fact. Several years ago at the Doheny Blues Festival, Rip Cat Records recording artist, White Boy James and the Blues Express was on stage. The band’s front man, James Page, took out a bottle, opened it and took a swig. He held up the bottle and apparently waxed rhapsodic about the beer that he had just consumed in front of thousands of blues fans. We talked after the set and he asked me how his soliloquy sounded since this particular ale was one of the festival sponsors. I remembered the visual clearly, but I could not remember a word that he said. My eyes were working behind my camera, but my ears definitely were not.

It became crystal clear in that moment that the human brain does not allow multi-tasking. At best, we give attention to one thing, quickly switch to the next and back again. Study after study has shown this to be clinically true. Some people are just better at the quick switch than others.

The digital image revolution has allowed us to unwittingly give up our own participation in experiencing the events in our lives including the experience of enjoying live music. As Essiq says in his article, “In fact, the only way to miss the creativity of the evening was if you were so busy documenting it that you removed yourself from the actuality of the moment.”

Music fans have become very poor listeners as a result of this ubiquitous visual explosion. Again and again I have watched people take photos or video and then take the time to post while ignoring what is actually going on in front of their down-turned eyes. They seem to be ignoring their own experience in favor of “sharing the experience”. To what degree this has more to do with their own primal need to share with the world that, ‘I am at a real fun show and you’re not,’ is probably worthy of a separate treatise.

As a professional photographer, this is something that I am paid to do. I give up my own experience of the event so that I can share it with others. There are times when I have to put away my equipment so I can be there and truly participate. I have to make apologies often to those with who I am with because I am not really there with them in a real palpable sense. I am in a bubble of my own visual experience.

This is a personal sacrifice for me. I do it willingly for the opportunity to create what has been referred to as my art. I see so many others giving up their own experiences without thinking about the lost opportunities of actually being in the moment. Does it occur to these people what they are giving up? Do they care so little about the music that they don’t care what they are sacrificing?

It has been said that blues music is illusionary music, that is a series of esoteric dialects. In other words blues is a language. The challenge for the musician is to learn to speak the language and for the audience to be able to understand it. Do video and amateur photography help this understanding take place? I am unsure if very many even understand that there is a question, they are just following the social media party line of posting everything that happens to them. Back in the day, it took commitment both to acquire the necessary gear and be willing to learn to use it while today it is built into the communication devices we all have in our pockets at all times.

I wonder to what degree these technological and therefore social changes have affected the performances themselves? The true blues musician has put in the same type of study and practice as a professional photographer. There used to be a gentlemen's agreement between performer and photographer that unflattering images were left on the cutting room floor, while today every faux pas is available for public consumption across the globe before the song is even over. 

I sometimes think that the idea of photography as a fine art has passed its zenith and is destined for the scrapheap of history. The profession may be doomed, subsumed by the volume of images uploaded daily to the web. The field which I chose to be my life’s work is becoming increasingly, and very rapidly, more and more irrelevant. Therefore I am becoming more and more irrelevant. This is a source of sadness for me. What is worse is that there are not one, but two art forms under siege by these digital dilettantes and that saddens me a great deal more.

Again to Essiq “And if you decide it’s your phone and you’ll do with it whatever you darn well please try to remember that except for your now well-documented bragging rights. (“I was there … see!”)

I might ask the question; Were you even there at all? As Essig went on to say, “You might as well have just stayed home relating to the world through your screens.”

Editors Note: The Forbes article can be found at the following link. It is recommended reading. As always we would love to hear your thoughts on this piece as well as the Forbes article which inspired Alex to share his thoughts on this topic. You can find examples of Alex’s fine photography in our ezine almost every month. Our February edition is no exception.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/2014/01/13/a-digital-life-lesson-how-steve-jobs-almost-ruined-neil-young/