The camera as we know it started blossoming in the early 1800s. The reasonably contemporary democratization of photography with the proliferation of user-friendly and affordable technology in digital imaging since the mid-1990s has upped the game in the art of photography. The average person today can take what would have been considered a great picture even thirty years ago with significantly less difficulty than they would have faced in the pre-digital era. Imagine, then, the difficulties of writing, which has been around for thousands of years, and which has been reasonably democratized hundreds of years ago. For the sake of argument, we may ignore the entire volume of very early writing, but even then we have to consider that the printing press was well in place by the year 1500. Writing material, associated costs, and consequent adoption and practice of writing saw big breakthroughs when wood-pulp paper was commercially established by 1900. As a consequence of this, writing in a lay sense is no longer strictly a specialized skill. Despite this consequence, writers have existed and have continued to do reasonably well for themselves. However, at the median, considering various factors, between writing and taking pictures, by the way of establishment, the former presents a far more challenging terrain, I think.
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 08:29:30 +0000