photography's digital demise - in photographs

A demise that is also a digital rebirth. A rebirth that marks not just the end of the big  photography companies but a rethink about photography's role in our post film world.  The  darkness of the dark rooms of the old photography may be disappearing  but there is a new light being shone on a new, more pervasive and powerful didital future.  Nostalgia is natural  but looking forward is the way ahead. 

Burley has traveled the globe over a period of six years and photographed Ilford in London, AGFA-Gavaert in Belgium, Polaroid in the Netherlands and even Dwayne’s Photo in Kansas, which became known as the last lab to develop Kodachrome. The resulting project, Disappearance of Darkness, is a bittersweet visual eulogy to film, shot on the medium whose demise it documents.

“The companies — some of them over a century old — laid off tens of thousands of workers, demolished factories the size of steel mills and found themselves in an economic free fall as their customer base shrunk from millions to thousands almost overnight,” says Burley.

In 2000, U.S. consumers bought 19.7 million film cameras. By 2010, sales were below 250,000. Film sales peaked in 1999 with 800 million rolls purchased in the U.S. alone. But in 2011, Americans bought a mere 20 million rolls. In 2012, smartphone sales grew by 58 percent, while point-and-shoot sales dropped by 17 percent. The iPhone 4 is the most-used camera today.

“Today the shift to digital media is almost complete but it appears unlikely that any of these once powerful, profitable and innovative companies will adapt to the twenty-first century,” says Burley. “Digital technology has changed the way we live our lives and to some degree the demise of the photographic industry provided a touchstone for just how rapidly these dramatic changes have happened.”

“The book marks a point in time when photography  – at least photography as practiced by the majority – ceased to be a physical medium,” says Burley. “Photographs are no longer material objects created on film or paper – they have become dematerialized data stored in a cloud somewhere else. This alters one of the photograph’s most important characteristics – it’s relationship to time and place.”

“A camera is no longer just a camera,” says Burley. “It captures video, sound, GPS coordinates along with all kinds of other metadata. Just as the digital chip replaced film, some other device will soon supplant the chip and the idea of what a camera is and does.”

http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/11/robert-burley-disappearance-of-darkness/