Digital Cameras and Photography: Everyone’s a Documentary Maker

Abstract

Digital cameras developed in 1975 and had an enormous impact and were very popular, but their very existence is now threatened by smartphones, such as the iPhone, which has a very good camera and has led many people to use their smartphones to take pictures rather than their digital cameras. I offer statistics that show that the sale of digital cameras dropped by 42% in 2014, with entry-level digital cameras suffering the biggest loss of popularity. Next I discuss the relationship between photographs and reality and the role photographs play in our image-centric world. This is followed by a discussion of a device, the narrative clip, that takes a photograph every thirty seconds and sends them to a computer for editing. I suggest that at the unconscious level, this device reflects an attempt we make to assert that our lives are important and have meaning. The chapter ends with a discussion of Google’s Glass device.