Not too many years ago, the only way that a photograph could be presented was as a finished image. The photographer saw something that he or she felt was worth photographing, they took a picture on some type of film, ultimately the film was developed, and finally, an image was printed. If the image was not printed, it usually existed only as a negative, unless the image was made on transparency slide film, which would show the photograph, but in a very reduced size, difficult to see. So until a print was made, there wasn't much to show anyone. The primary goal for the fine art photographer then was not only a print, but a larger scale print that could be displayed, ideally in a gallery setting, or reproduced in a book or magazine. Because galleries were so limited in number, however, there were not many fine art photographers and very talented people had few places to display their work. Only the best of the best could hope for a gallery show or be highlighted in one of the few photo magazines that existed. The photo book was so expensive to produce that publishers would only undertake this kind of effort with a major artist. Other than these pathways, the best you could hope for was to show your pictures to family and friends, praying that they would not run in the other direction when you came at them with a handful of prints or a slide carousel tray ready to go.
Times changed, however, with the advent of digital imaging. Initially, people started sharing their digital images by e-mail or text message to friends, but once social media, especially Facebook and Instagram, appeared on the scene, a whole series of new opportunities presented themselves that literally anyone capable of taking a digital image could now take advantage of. It became possible to show your photograph instantly around the world to not only friends and family, but to strangers whom you had never met. Unlike relatives and friends, who always told you your work was fantastic, strangers could be far more objective about what they were seeing and give you a more honest opinion, typically through clicking on a "like" button or symbol. In theory, this concept sounds ideal: you can show your work to potentially hundreds or thousands of people and see immediately if they appreciated your efforts or not. But some serious issues soon became apparent. Since now anyone could be a self-designated "photographer," photography proliferated rapidly on the Internet to the point where the barrage of images confronting an individual each day was overwhelming. When thousands of pictures cross your path daily, it becomes very problematic to give any single image more than a cursory glance, so to capture someone's eye, photos need to be splashy and dramatic. Few things are more dramatic and colorful than sunrises and sunsets, or night photos of the milky way, so variations of these themes virtually exploded, and instead of an image revealing a story or emotion that might only be appreciated when one views an image for more than a few seconds, the images that blasted light into your eyes became the primary goal for many photographers on the Internet. If one examines the work of some of the greatest photographers from the last century, such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, Paul Caponigro (who still produces beautiful work), and Wynn Bullock, to name but a few of the great landscape photographers, even their strongest images reveal a level of subtlety and thoughtfulness that much current imagery seems to lack. Rarely did these people take a photo directly into the sun, preferring to reveal what the sun produced when it struck the landscape, in other words, they recorded the light upon the land. In part, they were hampered by the fact that their tools were often not capable of handling some of the brightness of sunrises and sunsets, and astrophotography was literally out of the question, but even if they could do this kind of work, it seems that they preferred to reveal something else in their imagery, a type of emotional content quite different from the Internet photographer of today.
That is not to say that modern photography is bad, or doesn't meet some higher standard, it is just different because the exigencies of the way images are now produced, viewed, and appreciated dictate a different approach. As a result, some truly wonderful images go "unliked," since they fail to capture people's attention in the second or two in which someone scrolls by the photo. I would therefore suggest that more attention be paid to all images, splashy and quiet, in the hope that more of the current situation that affects humankind is revealed to the viewer. We now have the greatest tools ever in history for making images. It would be a shame if we failed to recognize the extraordinary talents of those individuals whose work speaks to us at a quieter level.
Canyonlands and Colorado River from Deadhorse Point, Utah, 2018