The sheer quantity of photographs currently being made is stunning. The image is replacing text.
Marvin Heiferman says that it is estimated that every day, 1.3 billion photographs are made. Of those, 350 million are uploaded to Facebook. Google+ users, who are currently being offered some of the most advanced and easy to use photo-editing tools to lure them away from Facebook, are posting another 214 million a day. 150 million photos are shared through Snapchat, 55 million via Instagram, and another 1.4 million are added to Flickr. Many of them are just going to disappear.
In the analogue past people photographed Kodak moments---the special moments/events in their lives. Now, with the smart phone, people are taking the representation into their own hands and to confront, rehearse, perform, and then publish images that track where or declare who they are. The current uses of images in our everyday lives suggests that photography traditional definition as a hobby or career is been replaced by photography central role in our culture. We are all image creators now and we are taking more and more pictures of details: coffee, signs, painted nails, plates of food, feet.
Rather than being a universal language photography is multiple visual languages. People have wildly different contexts in which they use photographs — different criteria for assessing them, reasons for taking them, priorities when looking at and evaluating them. Photographs are useful to people in different ways than they are useful to others. That means we need a broader appreciation of photography as it comes to play an ever more central role in our lives.
The most sustained and promoted discourse around photography has taken place in the worlds of art and art photography, which has been preoccupied with images made as art or the handful of vernacular images that get upgraded to that status. This is a very narrow focus that excludes most photographs and when reading and writing alone longer define 21st century literacy in a world where images and language are intertwined and of equal importance.
The Marvin Heiferman, edited Photography Changes Everything argues that rather than concentrating on fine art and documentary photography, as is usually the case in serious studies of the subject, we need to see photography as the sprawling, kaleidoscopic thing that it is. Most photography has nothing to do with art or documentary work. Instead everyone from scientists and engineers to soldiers, anthropologists, social reformers, fashion designers, diplomats, poets, and pornographers have used photography as a tool of their trade.