Hey, Photographers, Here’s a News-Flash: The Future Belongs to You

I’ve never seen photographers so pessimistic and depressed about their futures. Small wonder, with so many publications flagging, dying and dead.

Well, buck up, friends. I bring news from a new world, and it’s all good.

You wouldn’t know it to talk to most people in the publishing business–yet–but the migration from print to digital platforms could be the best thing that ever happened to you and your profession. The reason is pretty simple, but it takes some explaining to get there.

As everybody knows, we’re undergoing a fundamental disruption in publishing. What was going to emerge from the wreckage has been less obvious, but the proliferation of eReaders, the imminent Apple iTablet and their inevitably lighter and more ubiquitous descendants are finally bringing the future into focus.

All the new devices have two things in common: They bring screens closer to you, off your desk and into your hands–you will actually think of curling up with them–and they are platforms for visual media. The devices around today that don’t do much beyond putting words into e-ink are already becoming niche devices. On the new digital devices, story-telling of the kind that you and I do for a living will become more visual than it has ever been before, and the basis for virtually every screen-load of it will be the still image.

Think about it: You cannot use video to anchor a layout on a screen any more than you could on a page (except possibly with an HD screen grab, and a wonderfully composed screen grab is a happy accident, not something any designer would like to count on). You cannot base a digital-platform layout on text either, for obvious reasons–even though lots of magazine layouts are still text-heavy pages.  As the basis for a designed screenshot, about the only alternative to a good still image is a drawing, animation, or other work of art.

Lots of web sites are doing text-heavy design right now–a solution that only defines the mistake of “repurposing” print products for the web instead of reimagining and reinventing content for a new medium. Think of early television, when all they could think to do was shoot radio programs.  That’s where the digital migration of print publishing is today.

The media revolution happening right now is as radical as the transition from script to printing press, only in some ways this transition is even more fundamental–a change not just in replication and ubiquity of words and images but in story-telling itself.

Any minute now, the broadband world will give rich new meaning to the awful, much-underestimated word “multimedia”–and the good news for you, my photographer friends, is that the visual medium most critical for vivid digital story-telling is yours.

Jim Gaines

Editor-in-Chief, FLYPmedia

Twitter: @jamesrgaines