You and I have talked about this before. I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that if an article says "poll' or "survey" that the numbers are purely pulled out of the air unless there is a link to the actual numbers. Honestly I expected this number to be higher. What do people in that age bracket actually HAVE that they can take pictures of? When I was that age, pictures were of me and my friends; we just took fewer of them as we had film and that stuff is expensive. Taking a picture meant that you were committing to the cost of going to the camera store, paying for film development and waiting a few days. (1-Hour Photo came into play for us when we got 'real' jobs and could afford it.) Looking back on the pictures that I have from when I was that age, fewer than 1/4 of them are of myself anywhere in the picture, another 1/3 are other people I was with. I'd figure, just thinking out loud, that with the ease and cheapness of picture taking that there would be more pictures of people as 1/4 and 30% are in the same ballpark. Thinking of One Hour Photo make me google new articles about them, there are less than 200 left as fewer people print photos while CVS, Walgreen's and Walmart take over fighting for the crumbs. One of the friends I hung out with was desperate to get a job there as it meant he had access to photo chemicals that he wanted to "borrow" for his own film development at home in his 35mm while the rest of us peasants had to deal with 110 film cartridges.Of course, if you drill down it's a Telegraph article reporting an internal Samsung poll of 3,000 people that can't be found anywhere else, but still...
Polls have shown that 30% of all photographs taken by 18 to 24 year-olds are selfies
Their food, duh. IN ALL FAIRNESS The tales you tell of photography are not wrong. My first camera was a Zenit APK, which took 35, scratched UFOs across landscapes with its shitty Soviet shutter, took batteries that were not available this side of the Iron Curtain and did an awful lot to thwart my photographic abilities for 10 or more years. You had to be serious about a photo of something to take it with the Zenit. But that world is dead. These days, a phone is a piece of shit if it doesn't have two cameras and a person is a piece of shit if he doesn't have a phone. That 110 your mother dragged along on vacations is a wretched anachronism compared to anything available today and the level of automation available guarantees that pretty much anyone with a thumb can get a pretty good picture of pretty much anything, any time, anywhere. So in this brave new world, where 98% of your schedule is repetitive and 99% of your surroundings are mundane, what changes? What warrants documentation? I mean, I have no set schedule and I lead a fairly adventuresome life and probably 40% of my photos these days are my wife or my kid. And I have a wife. And I have a kid. I don't think it's narcissism. I think it's the same mediated experience as always, only with much cheaper mediation. The people who take a lot of selfies wouldn't have taken anything back when it meant 35 cents a shot, plus a tripod, plus a shutter release.What do people in that age bracket actually HAVE that they can take pictures of?
This was my first camera That camera looks masochistic. In other words, one of those toys that when you master it, you feel 50 feet tall and invincible.