I watched a video the other day about the negative effects influencers have on photography, by …… (wait for it) …..an influencer. It got me thinking if this was actually true or did it just appear that way. It would seem to me that in order to have ruined it, they would have to have been involved with photography prior to its downfall.
Influencers are many things. Mostly negative. They are to the digital world what ambulance chasing lawyers are to the courtroom. Parasites. But one thing they didn’t do is ruin photography. Photography was ruined before they got there. Blaming them for the demise makes no more sense than blaming the maggots, found on a corpse, for the death of the person it once contained.
No, they are not the cause, they are the result. Like when a nation is taken over, there is never an overnight change. There is a transition period where factions fight for control. We are in that transition period now. Influencers are merely one of the factions feeding on the chaos in the aftermath.
Photography died along with the music, TV, Movie, Book, and News industries (among others). And all of this died as a result of the fracturing of the collected culture which began with the death of not just the print media, but the death of physical media. In a non direct way, digital it turns out, ruined photography. Just not in the way we all expected. Not by replacing film, but by replacing everything else around it.