> For the rest of adolescence, you’d flee any adult wielding a camera.
I'm convinced we will see this again as children born in the last ~5 years become adults. Every toddler I know is constantly harassed by their mothers to pose for yet another picture, and if there's one sure way to make a kid hate something, it's for their parents to force it on them. I imagine a generation of kids who refuse to get into a group photo, and who instinctively turn and walk away when someone says "Ok, smile!"
Anecdotally, I grew up that way pre-digital cameras (I'm 29, my mom is a photographer) and I actively avoid having my picture taken to this day because of it.
I occasionally take pictures, but I make sure to ask "Can I take your picture?" Every. Single. Time. Consent matters. If you're a parent who likes taking pictures, you should do the same as soon as your kid is old enough to understand and respond to the question.
I completely agree on getting consent. Always! The only exceptions are when the subject is so far away that you can only tell it's a person, and cannot determine the identity of the person. Besides, it's all too easy to be perceived as being creepy when you're photographing strangers. Don't be that creepy person.
I disagree. Candid photographs are way more natural and interesting than ones in which everyone is posing. I would much prefer people not to ask permission before they take my photo. In fact, the photo I use as my profile picture on social media was taken without my knowledge, and it’s better because of that.
I would think that it largely depends on the age. I would agree with you for ages 3-9 years old and probably disagree for 12-18 years old, with the 10-11 year olds being a toss-up.
But the kids being followed by mom with cameras are in the 1-5 years old range. I never seen mom taking that many pics of older ones. Then it is more a thing of taking pick or two when on family trip with nice view around for family whatsapp group at max.
I don't think I agree with this -- I've spent some time doing amateur digital and film photography, and my experience has been that film photography is much more forgiving by default. You can do really excellent things with a modern digital camera, but a lot of phone cameras have short focal lengths[1] and create very harsh captures of peoples' skin, grease, features, &c.
Edit: This is to say that photos might be more realistic now, which in turn tends to make them less flattering ;-)
I don't agree with it, either. First, many lenses in the film era gave a bit softer results. Second, the transitions in film are smoother, and higher-speed films have grain that tends to make faces look better than a digital sensor.
I think the article's point is more so that people are constantly prepared for having their picture taken where as previously people would go to social functions without the constant expectation of being on camera.
I don't really disagree with their points but I think its important to realize that its actually only a small number of people that actually take that many selfies.
> I don't really disagree with their points but I think its important to realize that its actually only a small number of people that actually take that many selfies.
In a way, the West caught up with Asia. I remember the days when the constant group photos at Asian business functions--and the Japanese tourists clicking photos of every thing and everyone--seemed pretty weird.
Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” is a mind-expanding read on this.
She traces the history of photography and how it changed people. Suddenly with portable cameras, vacations became more about taking photos, which meant prioritizing places that looked good in photographs. It also meant thinking about and prioritizing being photographed.
Some of the essays are basically about Instagram and its effects on society…she just happened to have written them in the 1970s.
This is a dead thread; I assume nobody but you will see this. Though that might dilute what I’m about to say, given this is a public forum, I still wanted to say, emphatically, thank you. I bought a copy of Sontag’s On Photography on the back of your comment. It is one of the more worldview-changing books I have read in a long time.
I honestly can't say if I agree with it or not. Article seemed to finish without any conclusion/resolution/climax... I kept scrolling to see if there was more underneath the ads.
Yes, people take more selfies and care about them more.
Is it a purely technology driven change? Is it culture? Will it change again and how fast? Why is it? What is the impact? Not addressed. I'm not even 100% sure if the author IS truly lamenting the perceived disappearance of bad photos.
That being said, my 2 cents;
1. Bad photos still abound. On my facebook feed at least :). They can be bad in many different ways - poor lighting, poor framing, awkward pose or expression, uninteresting subject, or any number of other perceived flaws.
2. There were always people who cared about photography (and took great photos in 70's 80's 90's etc), and those who didn't. Ratio may have changed. If more people care about photography and take great photos - not only of people as article focuses on, but also landscape and food and product and vacation and architecture... doesn't that just raise the standard and as a result we all get better photos to enjoy? If this is not a win, article doesn't discuss why. Nobody is stopping anybody, including author, from taking "bad" or "so bad they're good" or "brutally casual" photos to their heart's content; if the article is of the "I wish more people did things the way I want them to" / "Lamenting random thing of the past that's done less now" format, again, I'd like more depth to it to be interesting. Is there possibility people ARE taking and even cherishing such photos, just not sharing them? And if nobody is taking enjoying or sharing such photos, implying nobody wants to / cares, under what criteria is that a bad thing? :)
3. People will disagree what makes a "good photo". Today fashions are faster than ever. Posed, real casual, fake casual, real bad, fake bad, processed, unprocessed, seemingly unprocessed... all of these go in and out and have their own subcultures. In many ways, a posed 90's wedding photo, by today's standards, looks more awkward than 90's casual wedding photo. Whereas 2015 "casual wedding photo" was "faked" or rather arranged to one degree or another. Our very perception of "Casual look" has changed dramatically. If you want to future-proof, a lightly-processed, lightly-and-invisibly-arranged photo seems to stand test of time the best, i.e. classics seem to remain classics.
4. People have more choices to capture retain and view what they want; remember their own past or view others through whichever selective lens they want. Again, article doesn't even touch on any pros or cons.
So I still feel like I've been bamboozled and am missing the significant half/conclusion of the article :D
Edit; As for modern phones - most flagships now offer immediate one-click change of lighting, blurred background, skin-healing, even focal length adjustment so ears and nose don't look disproportionate. And even to this day, there are people who know to use their zoom lens for portraits and those who don't.
I tend to agree with you. I too have spent time doing amateur digital and film. I started shooting on 110mm cameras when I was < 10, and those photos were bad!. By 13 I'd graduated to a low-end SLR and learned to use it properly. I shot on that all through high school and college. I was recently looking at some of my old photos, and I'm very pleased to have good photos from those youthful years, whereas my friends only have the crummy photos the author describes. I've gotten back into film, developing it at home, and having fun pushing the limits of the medium. It's a true pleasure.
Film can take _great_ photos! But my takeaway from the article was that before the ubiquity of smart phones with great cameras packed full of auto-adjusting technology, the number of people able to take advantage of film was low. That is, the signal to noise ratio was low, whereas now it is high. Most people back then used disposable cameras, or fixed focus point-and-shoot ~ and they couldn't be bothered to invest in an SLR and learn the basics of photography (exposure, etc...). As a result, lots and lots of truly awful photos were taken.
Edit: I noticed that the articles title "Photos are too flattering now" is not as same as the <title> tag, which is "The Internet Killed Bad Photos". I think that photos are not too/excesively flattering, and I think it was improved cameras that killed bad photos, not the internet. A better title would be "The ubiquity of high-quality entry-level cameras has dramatically improved photo quality amongst the general population." ~ a far less sexy title.
I generally agree with your comments. I did a fair bit of film photography (mostly B&W) decades ago. From digital photography perspective, I'm an average Joe who mostly takes snapshots with smartphone. I just wanted to make a comment about post-processing.
Post-processing with film (ignoring modern-day scanning to digital) historically required one to have a darkroom (and skills) to do the desired post-processing. I did this a lot when I worked for a small town newspaper many years ago. Often, the writers/editors would take photos from whatever events they attended. I'd print a contact sheet for them (after developing the film) and then they'd use a grease pencil to circle the ones they wanted to include for publication. The majority of the prints I made involved doing some combination of cropping, dodging, burning, and enlarger exposure adjustments to make the end result better looking than the original. The writers would often make comments like "Wow, I'm a pretty good photographer!" after seeing the final prints. I would just smile and say "yeah, it turned out good" without mentioning all of the darkroom improvements that were made. All of this to say that historically, the only people that usually had any post-processing of their film photographs were those who had darkrooms or professionals who would have some of their prints air-brushed.
Contrast that with any of the common digital cameras now (including smartphones). Many, if not the vast majority, have built-in capabilities for red-eye removal, adjusting brightness, color correction, cropping, etc. On top of this, the bar is quite low (and tools are plenty) for doing post-processing on the computer. It seems that many (most?) of the serious amateurs and professionals routinely do post-processing of the shots they care about. I would think that post-processing is more common with digital for the serious amateurs and professionals as compared with film (prior to digital scanning), and is now a thing by many (to some extent) of the smartphone casual photographers.
> post-processing is more common with digital for the serious amateurs and professionals
Yes... and kind of no? Many professionals can only make a living by being very efficient, so it's a combination of planning the shoot and getting each picture right before pressing the shutter button, and batch applying one-click standard presets that they have developed.
So post-processing, but of a kind similar to film and paper selection in the film days, where you would choose a particular film and/or paper brand for your images.
The amateurs I've seen fall into two camps. One spends a long time in post. (This seems to go with obsessing about gear.) The other group would rather be out there taking photos and tries to mininise post-processing effort like the pros do. They'd rather spend 40 hours learning how to light their subject than 40 hours in their software.
For competition or gallery photos, of course, yes. Sometimes many hours or days on a single image.
I've never been one to care about social media presentation and don't take many photos, but I have a vivid memory of having a photo taken without warning around high school and instinctively duck facing it, which in retrospect was a defense mechanism to purposefully any culpability of not looking good in that particular photo. Very unexpected and unsettling self reflection.
That an interesting strategy. I usually do the opposite, and instinctively smile when a camera is pointed my way. Better to get as good a look as possible rather than capture my usual relaxed scowl for posterity.
I was "lucky" enough to do high school/college just before digital photography became mainstream, so I'm grateful for all the things not documented and published to the world.
That said, in way too many of the photos I do have from those days I'm mugging for the camera or flipping the bird or something else ridiculous. In retrospect, I've come to similar conclusions about my likely motivations.
My experience is that people (including myself) are much more analytical about video and photo than they are when seeing in person.
I notice every wrinkle and blemish in video, but do not perceive them IRL.
In this way, I think the touch up feature is a more honest representation than having it off. It blunts the edge of my critical gaze and this reduces that distraction. In person I’m paying a lot more attention to the interaction and body language, and run out of time to eagle-eye the details.
I sure hope I look worse in photos than I look in person, if the photos of me are "flattering" I'm going to go hide in a cave to spare the rest of you.
> You’d be tempted to throw a good number of shots away, but more often you didn’t, because film was expensive and tossing out photographs seemed like a vain and frivolous thing to do.
At some point, I suppose cloud storage gets cheap enough (or outpaces file sizes…) that you end up keeping the bad digital photos because it’s not worth the effort to delete them
For me, it's not so much the storage; that's cheap. But without some level of curation, whether or not you actually delete most of the "rejects," it's a management headache. How do you find the shots you care about buried by everything else?
My sister decided about a year ago to lose some weight and focus on herself for a change. Nothing wrong with that, everyone should have the time to do the things that make them feel good.
She now spends every day at 40 posting selfies to facebook along with a bunch of motivational memes. She was not happy with me when I pointed out to her that the filter she was using made her look younger, but it also made her look like she was going bald in the front. It was eliminating some crow's feet and bringing out her eyes, but also washing out her hairline.
Just another you're doing it wrong because I say so article. You don't even need to read it, there is a guy who was put in jail by a corrupt judge because he successfully sued a gas company in South America for billions, and it has been protested by international courts to no affect, but yeah the Atlantic wants to cover why it's bad everything is better.... Jesus Christ.
I don't relate to this article at all. On the rare occasion when I need a picture of myself I use software to automatically snap ≈10 photos a second and then comb through a couple hundred to maybe find one good one.
I also get the feeling that modern phone lenses are optimized to make female faces appear slim, since females are generally more concerned with taking photos of themselves, and this is not good for masculine features. But I wouldn't know how to verify something like this.
My old Samsung phone had a very slight fisheye effect. If your face was in the middle of the picture it was very slimming, but you could see the distortion at the outer edges once you knew to look for it.
I miss the nude pics take with a shitty webcam in a dimly lit room you’d get in the early 2000s, either from the girlfriend, if you where lucky, or from a random girl in a chatroom,if the internet was extra weird that night.
Somehow those crappy 320x240 pictured where much interesting than anything snapped with the latest smartphone.
You missed out on the ubiquity of Polaroid nudes in the 70's and 80's. They always had this seedy vibe... it's like they made sex taboo just by virtue of lighting. Or perhaps we now associate that thanks to Polaroid.
>Back when the one-click Kodak dominated, most pictures—unflattering, off-center, accidental, overexposed, and everyone as red-eyed as vermin—were not worth keeping.
The author appears to be referring to the point-and-shoot/disposable era (where the cheapest cameras often had no focusing mechanism), which might have been the nadir of photography, looking at "average photograph."
Photographs taken on good film by a moderately-skilled photographer with an SLR or rangefinder camera from the 1970s (or even earlier) look great.
It's from a 4x5 negative, so you're correct, probably not an SLR or a rangefinder, he did favor the 4x5 view camera. Which is an even more complicated mechanism to use than SLR or rangefinder types. Still highlights that good-quality photographs were taken in decades past.
Feh. I have plenty of blurry photos with my fancy iPhone 6. Or backsides of things walking out of frame because it takes so long to boot that the moment has passed.
The photos were too flattering from the early days of photography, just as painted portraits were before that. Remember the archival daguerreotypes of people from centuries past, carefully posed, lit, and retouched? Sure, those were the studio photos of often wealthier people. But that was already setting the trend of creating an embellished likeness to span over times.
The mass photography kind of broke that studio access barrier, but not the flattering barrier. So for some time the photos were more "documentary". Meanwhile it also set that wastefulness trend partly due to inexperience, partly due to cheap or complex hardware, partly due to just plain old consumerism (double sets of auto-cropped 3x5 for the price of one set etc). Still, that desire for creating the flatering images never ceased, and for the important events a pro photographer would be budgeted.
Finally, with an advent of digital and esp. smartphone photography the access to flattering likeness has been fully democratized. Curiously, the increased wastefulness of digital photos also devalued the importance of the personal images. Who can sit through gigabytes of me-here-me-there pics? Prints too, their retrospective importance is lost to reminded glances at the past you which are offered by social networks apps.
I guess, the last barrier left to break in this is the critical eye that chooses from tons of virtual images only those which truly worth to materialize in prints for spanning over the times AND weave them into a life-story worth someone elses attention. How much time will one have in the future to perceive the pictorial life of one's grand-grand-pa?
Of course, it will still be flattering. I'm sure there're already apps for that.
I'm sure someone wrote a similar lament when cameras were invented; waxing nostalgic about having to spend hours with an artist in order to have a portrait painted.
My college-era photos from the '00s are all Nikon Coolpix vintage: 8.0MP, no red-eye correction and a flash so bright it left no trace of the actual lighting of the venue.
In 2021, I look at front-facing camera shots of myself and I'm convinced they (Samsung at least) have something in the image processing algorithm that smoothes out wrinkles, even without any filters applied. My face is simply not that smooth and blemish-free.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadI'm convinced we will see this again as children born in the last ~5 years become adults. Every toddler I know is constantly harassed by their mothers to pose for yet another picture, and if there's one sure way to make a kid hate something, it's for their parents to force it on them. I imagine a generation of kids who refuse to get into a group photo, and who instinctively turn and walk away when someone says "Ok, smile!"
I occasionally take pictures, but I make sure to ask "Can I take your picture?" Every. Single. Time. Consent matters. If you're a parent who likes taking pictures, you should do the same as soon as your kid is old enough to understand and respond to the question.
For kids, it is normal.
Edit: This is to say that photos might be more realistic now, which in turn tends to make them less flattering ;-)
[1]: https://www.diyphotography.net/gif-explains-changing-focal-l...
I don't really disagree with their points but I think its important to realize that its actually only a small number of people that actually take that many selfies.
You obviously don't live in Asia. :)
FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) is a real psychological threat of the modern age. I empathize with youths who have never known a time without hyper-FOMO.
Nihilists remedy to FOMO
She traces the history of photography and how it changed people. Suddenly with portable cameras, vacations became more about taking photos, which meant prioritizing places that looked good in photographs. It also meant thinking about and prioritizing being photographed.
Some of the essays are basically about Instagram and its effects on society…she just happened to have written them in the 1970s.
Yes, people take more selfies and care about them more.
Is it a purely technology driven change? Is it culture? Will it change again and how fast? Why is it? What is the impact? Not addressed. I'm not even 100% sure if the author IS truly lamenting the perceived disappearance of bad photos.
That being said, my 2 cents;
1. Bad photos still abound. On my facebook feed at least :). They can be bad in many different ways - poor lighting, poor framing, awkward pose or expression, uninteresting subject, or any number of other perceived flaws.
2. There were always people who cared about photography (and took great photos in 70's 80's 90's etc), and those who didn't. Ratio may have changed. If more people care about photography and take great photos - not only of people as article focuses on, but also landscape and food and product and vacation and architecture... doesn't that just raise the standard and as a result we all get better photos to enjoy? If this is not a win, article doesn't discuss why. Nobody is stopping anybody, including author, from taking "bad" or "so bad they're good" or "brutally casual" photos to their heart's content; if the article is of the "I wish more people did things the way I want them to" / "Lamenting random thing of the past that's done less now" format, again, I'd like more depth to it to be interesting. Is there possibility people ARE taking and even cherishing such photos, just not sharing them? And if nobody is taking enjoying or sharing such photos, implying nobody wants to / cares, under what criteria is that a bad thing? :)
3. People will disagree what makes a "good photo". Today fashions are faster than ever. Posed, real casual, fake casual, real bad, fake bad, processed, unprocessed, seemingly unprocessed... all of these go in and out and have their own subcultures. In many ways, a posed 90's wedding photo, by today's standards, looks more awkward than 90's casual wedding photo. Whereas 2015 "casual wedding photo" was "faked" or rather arranged to one degree or another. Our very perception of "Casual look" has changed dramatically. If you want to future-proof, a lightly-processed, lightly-and-invisibly-arranged photo seems to stand test of time the best, i.e. classics seem to remain classics.
4. People have more choices to capture retain and view what they want; remember their own past or view others through whichever selective lens they want. Again, article doesn't even touch on any pros or cons.
So I still feel like I've been bamboozled and am missing the significant half/conclusion of the article :D
Edit; As for modern phones - most flagships now offer immediate one-click change of lighting, blurred background, skin-healing, even focal length adjustment so ears and nose don't look disproportionate. And even to this day, there are people who know to use their zoom lens for portraits and those who don't.
Film can take _great_ photos! But my takeaway from the article was that before the ubiquity of smart phones with great cameras packed full of auto-adjusting technology, the number of people able to take advantage of film was low. That is, the signal to noise ratio was low, whereas now it is high. Most people back then used disposable cameras, or fixed focus point-and-shoot ~ and they couldn't be bothered to invest in an SLR and learn the basics of photography (exposure, etc...). As a result, lots and lots of truly awful photos were taken.
Edit: I noticed that the articles title "Photos are too flattering now" is not as same as the <title> tag, which is "The Internet Killed Bad Photos". I think that photos are not too/excesively flattering, and I think it was improved cameras that killed bad photos, not the internet. A better title would be "The ubiquity of high-quality entry-level cameras has dramatically improved photo quality amongst the general population." ~ a far less sexy title.
Post-processing with film (ignoring modern-day scanning to digital) historically required one to have a darkroom (and skills) to do the desired post-processing. I did this a lot when I worked for a small town newspaper many years ago. Often, the writers/editors would take photos from whatever events they attended. I'd print a contact sheet for them (after developing the film) and then they'd use a grease pencil to circle the ones they wanted to include for publication. The majority of the prints I made involved doing some combination of cropping, dodging, burning, and enlarger exposure adjustments to make the end result better looking than the original. The writers would often make comments like "Wow, I'm a pretty good photographer!" after seeing the final prints. I would just smile and say "yeah, it turned out good" without mentioning all of the darkroom improvements that were made. All of this to say that historically, the only people that usually had any post-processing of their film photographs were those who had darkrooms or professionals who would have some of their prints air-brushed.
Contrast that with any of the common digital cameras now (including smartphones). Many, if not the vast majority, have built-in capabilities for red-eye removal, adjusting brightness, color correction, cropping, etc. On top of this, the bar is quite low (and tools are plenty) for doing post-processing on the computer. It seems that many (most?) of the serious amateurs and professionals routinely do post-processing of the shots they care about. I would think that post-processing is more common with digital for the serious amateurs and professionals as compared with film (prior to digital scanning), and is now a thing by many (to some extent) of the smartphone casual photographers.
Yes... and kind of no? Many professionals can only make a living by being very efficient, so it's a combination of planning the shoot and getting each picture right before pressing the shutter button, and batch applying one-click standard presets that they have developed.
So post-processing, but of a kind similar to film and paper selection in the film days, where you would choose a particular film and/or paper brand for your images.
The amateurs I've seen fall into two camps. One spends a long time in post. (This seems to go with obsessing about gear.) The other group would rather be out there taking photos and tries to mininise post-processing effort like the pros do. They'd rather spend 40 hours learning how to light their subject than 40 hours in their software.
For competition or gallery photos, of course, yes. Sometimes many hours or days on a single image.
More than that. There are apps that have “beauty filter” that can airbrush your face, enlarge your eyes, and reduce your jaw in real time.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/10/1026074/tiktok-m...
Less subtly, some can even outright change your gender.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56447357
That said, in way too many of the photos I do have from those days I'm mugging for the camera or flipping the bird or something else ridiculous. In retrospect, I've come to similar conclusions about my likely motivations.
I don't want to be meeting anybody in person and have them think - this dude looks terrible. Let's just set that expectation from the beginning.
Is that not the default?
I notice every wrinkle and blemish in video, but do not perceive them IRL.
In this way, I think the touch up feature is a more honest representation than having it off. It blunts the edge of my critical gaze and this reduces that distraction. In person I’m paying a lot more attention to the interaction and body language, and run out of time to eagle-eye the details.
Am I alone in this?
At some point, I suppose cloud storage gets cheap enough (or outpaces file sizes…) that you end up keeping the bad digital photos because it’s not worth the effort to delete them
She now spends every day at 40 posting selfies to facebook along with a bunch of motivational memes. She was not happy with me when I pointed out to her that the filter she was using made her look younger, but it also made her look like she was going bald in the front. It was eliminating some crow's feet and bringing out her eyes, but also washing out her hairline.
- The Racial Bias Built Into Photography: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-b...
- How Kodak's Shirley Cards Set Photography's Skin-Tone Standard: https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s...
- The Shirley Card: Racial Photographic Bias through Skin Tone: https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/shirley-card-racial-photog...
- Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity: https://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/219...
- The Quiet Racism of Instagram Filters: https://www.racked.com/2015/7/7/8906343/instagram-racism
- A Whole Technology of Dyeing: A Note on Ideology and the Apparatus of the Chromatic Moving Image: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20025012
- Racial Discrimination in Face Recognition Technology: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discriminatio...
I have friends from India and East Asia, they look great on their phone-made FB photos.
I also get the feeling that modern phone lenses are optimized to make female faces appear slim, since females are generally more concerned with taking photos of themselves, and this is not good for masculine features. But I wouldn't know how to verify something like this.
Somehow those crappy 320x240 pictured where much interesting than anything snapped with the latest smartphone.
The author appears to be referring to the point-and-shoot/disposable era (where the cheapest cameras often had no focusing mechanism), which might have been the nadir of photography, looking at "average photograph."
Photographs taken on good film by a moderately-skilled photographer with an SLR or rangefinder camera from the 1970s (or even earlier) look great.
Here's an example from ca. 1945: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppprs.00004/
your example is taken neither from an SLR nor a rangefinder. And it's taken by Ansel Adams.
This has to be satire
It's from a 4x5 negative, so you're correct, probably not an SLR or a rangefinder, he did favor the 4x5 view camera. Which is an even more complicated mechanism to use than SLR or rangefinder types. Still highlights that good-quality photographs were taken in decades past.
The mass photography kind of broke that studio access barrier, but not the flattering barrier. So for some time the photos were more "documentary". Meanwhile it also set that wastefulness trend partly due to inexperience, partly due to cheap or complex hardware, partly due to just plain old consumerism (double sets of auto-cropped 3x5 for the price of one set etc). Still, that desire for creating the flatering images never ceased, and for the important events a pro photographer would be budgeted.
Finally, with an advent of digital and esp. smartphone photography the access to flattering likeness has been fully democratized. Curiously, the increased wastefulness of digital photos also devalued the importance of the personal images. Who can sit through gigabytes of me-here-me-there pics? Prints too, their retrospective importance is lost to reminded glances at the past you which are offered by social networks apps.
I guess, the last barrier left to break in this is the critical eye that chooses from tons of virtual images only those which truly worth to materialize in prints for spanning over the times AND weave them into a life-story worth someone elses attention. How much time will one have in the future to perceive the pictorial life of one's grand-grand-pa?
Of course, it will still be flattering. I'm sure there're already apps for that.
I'm sure someone wrote a similar lament when cameras were invented; waxing nostalgic about having to spend hours with an artist in order to have a portrait painted.
In 2021, I look at front-facing camera shots of myself and I'm convinced they (Samsung at least) have something in the image processing algorithm that smoothes out wrinkles, even without any filters applied. My face is simply not that smooth and blemish-free.