By Charlie Devereux, liveblogging from The Democratic Image symposium
Pedro Meyer’s keynote talk was a tour through the development of technology and how this has affected his work and photography around the world.
Here are some facts he threw out:
– The omnipresence of digital means that film costs nothing nowadays. Today we should instead be looking at how much it costs to store the data. The cost and capacity of a hard drive is a better measure of how much photography costs today.
– The price of digital cameras is falling by 30% year-on-year
– The Mexican photagrapher Raul Ortega published a book with funding from the Chiapas government. He printed 4000 copies, 2000 of which remained unsold 4 years later. He then published it as a downloadable pdf on Meyer’s zonezero. 24,000 were downloaded within 30 days.
So, the argument goes, advances in technology (low cost + increased distribution) = more democratic.
Yes, but…
Having equal access to something cannot necessarily be construed as democratic – look at Coca Cola.
The debate continues with a video link up with Bill Thompson after the coffee break.
The Democratic Image 