"Inside the hive mind of stock photography" article

<p>Some interesting observations on the <em>zeitgeist </em>of stock photography.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/inside-the-hive-mind-of-stock-photography/284060/">http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/inside-the-hive-mind-of-stock-photography/284060/</a></p>

<p> </p>

<p>The contemporary zeitgeist (maybe I should just say spirit of the times) in photography is similar to the sound bite in broadcast news and has about the same degree of profoundness. Information, visual or auditive, is in the hands of the communication specialist or advertiser (commercial, political) and covers all media, and, with greatly increasing presence, social media. What does all this mean? Spurious distractions or adding meaning to life?</p>

<p>It's kind of tough to avoid being bombarded by all this visual and auditory information, most of it noise, and do what we really want to do, immersed in what is our private world, or one limited to hopefully significant interactions with others.</p>

<p>On opening my server's web page I used to get a neat and simple list of contents. They are still there but I have to put up with a lot of unsollicited visual bites. Nostalgia, visual sensations, anything that works in photography to distract and to create a need for the seller of something.</p>

<p>Are the visual bites the future of photography? Selfies at least are more personal.</p>

<p>Marcel Proust would be pleased, or maybe depressed, to see humanity is still in a search for lost times.</p>

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Stock photography is on life-support.

It's too easy to take and distribute

photos of high quality these days. I

predict a surge in free stock photos in

the future. More photographers will

prefer the Creative Commons

Attribution license than any commercial

stock license.

I'm slowly building a portfolio for the

purpose of putting the images under

CCA on Flickr. Granted, I'm not exactly

using Phase One backs to do it. But it

will be fun. :-)