Times of Unprecedented Changes

Go to almost every professional photographer's blog and you will find them complaining about how the Internet is killing the business and that today's the time of unprecedented changes. This is mostly done by people too busy looking back, instead of dealing with the changes.

Here's my abridged history of photography with the important cross-roads:

1. 1826: Nicéphore Niépce invents photography
2. Louis Daguerre in late 1838 or early 1839 makes with first photograph of a person with the Daguerréotype.
3. 1840 is the birth of the professional photographer with the commercialization of the Daguerréotype. It's the death knell of painters. Most painters earned a living doing portrait of the bourgeoisie, the merchants...
4. 1901 George Eastman creates the Brownie with film as we know it instead of the photo plate. It's the end of all the traveling portrait photographers.
5. 1925 Oskar Barnack creates the Leica to use 35mm movies film but horizontal instead of vertical like in films. All the war painters and history painters go out of business. All the graphics artists working for the newspapers and magazines lose their jobs.
6. 1937 Agfa-Gevaert creates the first color reversal film. All the Autochrome plate manufacturers go out of business. All the photographers expeditions with 10 to 50 people needed to travel and carry all the glass plates go out of business.
7. 1999 Nikon produces the D1, the first "real" professional digital camera.
8. 2001 The first commercially marketed cell phone with a camera integrated. The beginning of citizen journalism. The citizens are there during the event and document it. The beginning of the end of the photojournalists.

We are at the cross road of photography. The direction is clear. The problem is that the people with power and money don't want to go in the new direction. Many of you will know the Chinese curse:

May you live in interesting times.

We are.