Photography and the Constant Moment

I read this awesome Clayton Cubitt article on the implication of the ubiquity of cameras on photography. He starts with how a photographer used to be “like a hunter”:
“(Henri) Cartier-Bresson believed that the photographer is like a hunter, going forth into the wild, armed with quick reflexes and a finely-honed eye, in search of that one moment that most distills the time before him. In this instant the photographer reacts, snatching truth from the timestream in the snare of his shutter.”
That instant when a photographer clicked his camera was the Decisive Moment. And so it used to be a blink-and-you-missed-it world:
“One photographer. One lens. One camera. One angle. One moment. Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

Fast forward to the present day:
“Imagine an always-recording 360 degree HD wearable networked video camera…With a constant feed of all that she might see, the photographer is freed from instant reaction to the Decisive Moment, and then only faced with the Decisive Area to be in, and perhaps the Decisive Angle with which to view it.”
Yes, this is the present, not the future. Thanks to Google Glass. Welcome aboard, folks: we just went from the Decisive Moment to the Continuous Moment.

So what’s the future going to be like? Cubitt points out the inevitable next step:
“Evolve this further into a networked grid of such cameras, and the photographer is freed from these constraints as well.”
With that, a few possibilities leap to the mind:
“A street photographer could deploy them all over a neighborhood of interest, catching weeks worth of decisive moments to choose from at leisure. A photojournalist could embed them all across a war zone, on both sides of the battle, to achieve a level of reality and objectivity never seen before. A sports photographer could blanket the stadium and capture every angle, for the entire game, even from each player's perspective.”

Sure, there will be the purists who would protest:
“Just as we still (!) have partisans that argue film capture is more "genuine" than digital capture, we will certainly have those who will argue that a photographer must be in a place and time in order to genuinely photograph that place and time.”
Is that really necessary? Or was Henri Cartier-Bresson, the man considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, right in saying:
“People think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing."


Cubitt leaves no doubt as to which camp he is on when he says the “here and now” will be replaced with “anywhere and anytime.” He even goes so far as to say that this trend may be the great leveler of photographers:
“It continues the photographic tradition of artistic democratization by flattening limits of time, of geography, of access.”

Welcome to the brave, new world of photography!

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