Editor’s Viewpoint
The world of art has been no precedent for anything like photography. ere has never been an explosion of creative energy as big. K Madhavan Pillai puts things in perspective.
Images account for a largest percentage of the massive volumes of digital information floating in cyberspace. There are currently over 150 billion images on Facebook. That is more than 20 times the population of the planet. More images have made in the last year alone than in 187 years of history since photography began! In 2014, this number will increase by 30 percent. If you stop and think of all this for a minute, it will boggle the mind.
No other form of art has been as proli fic, or as populist. A single person making a picture somewhere in the world is now a part of a giant movement that is supporting more industrial production than any other form of art or enterprise in the history of mankind. There are more so ware downloads for photography than there is for any other kind of software. Everybody has Google Picasa. No other app has been faster downloaded than Instagram. Social networks have risen and died out because of the way it handles pictures. Chip and sensor manufacturers are now bigger than many car and bike makers. Memory cards and data storage needs photography to grow bigger if they need to grow as well. In terms of individual consumption of paper, photography now claims a percentage. The photo finishing industry depends on the growing importance of photographers at weddings.
The making of a single image, on the other hand, does not happen all too easily. It has taken an enormous amount of money, time, will, intellect and enterprise, to get that tiny device called a digital camera in your hand. It is the development of decades of innovation and research. It is the product of thousands of brilliant minds coming together to make photography what it is today.
And yet, photography is now a people’s art. It does not involve the hours and years of arduous learning just to make an image, like it did in the old days, let alone wield it as a tool for expression. There is an immediacy of results. Photography can now directly connect with the mind, of both the one making the picture and the one seeing the picture. It is a more universal language than other forms of art because understanding it does not need special training. In fact, photography has enabled more acceptance and appreciation between the people of the world, across continents and cultures, than any government agency has ever achieved. It has brought the world closer and made its people more socially aware and mature.
This does not mean that photography is devoid of grammar and rules. There is a training of the mind to see in certain ways. There is the application of process. There is the cra and the art of it. Not unlike other kinds of arts, this takes years, sometimes decades to master.
Welcome to Imaging India Expo 2013, where the art, science, industry and learning all come together for you to get the best of photography at a single location. We hope you enjoy your time at this expo.
