The Correction
Section I – The Smartphone Shift
We’re drowning in pictures. A hundred million go up every day, and most of them say almost nothing. Once, a photograph could carry metaphor, tension, maybe even meaning. Now it’s just snap, post, forget. The work of seeing has been replaced by the reflex of recording. The churn eats everything.
Maybe this was inevitable. Maybe photography had to go through this, the flood and the flattening, before the medium could find its edge again.
The phones in our pockets are good. Too good. They’ve made it so easy to take pictures that almost no one stops to think about what they’re taking. We end up with a flood of images that just show what’s there, not what it means. And since most of these images live and die on screens the size of your palm, everything has to be graphic, simple, immediate. Anything subtle gets flattened. Anything complex gets ignored. The screen shapes what we shoot and what we value. When pictures became easy to make, we stopped asking much of them. The result wasn’t visual blindness. It was visual boredom. And in that boredom, something else crept in: metadata, quietly deciding what images mattered.
Section II – Metadata’s Quiet Takeover
Back when photography still had some friction to it, images started with intent. There was usually a conversation — about story, tone, emotion. The meaning came first. Now, it’s reversed. An image is only useful if it’s findable. If it doesn’t carry the right keywords, it might as well not exist.
I saw this shift firsthand in stock photography. We didn’t start with ideas. We started with search data. What sold last month? What tags did it carry? Then we rebuilt the image to match. “Business handshake.” “Woman on laptop.” “Teamwork.” That’s what the brief became — not a mood or a message, but a list of search terms. The camera became just another tool for hitting marketable keywords. The story didn’t lead. The algorithm did.
This wasn’t some conspiracy. It was supply meeting demand in the most unimaginative way possible. Once the keywords decided what got made, the screen decided what could survive. And just like the tags, the screen favors the obvious.
Section III – Screens as Silent Editors
Even when an image somehow carries intent, the way it’s seen still flattens it. Most people view photographs on phones — tiny, compressed, algorithmically sorted. Even on a laptop, it’s not much better. These surfaces don’t reward subtlety. They punish it.
Layered images — ones that need a little time, a little breathing room — don’t land at two inches wide. The tones collapse. The metaphors disappear. We’ve started composing for screens, not for prints. For speed, not for depth. We didn’t just adapt to the screen. We let it shape what we thought was worth making. We’ve built a pipeline that favors the obvious at every stage: from how we shoot, to how we tag, to how we display. If we want different pictures, we have to break that pipeline.
Section IV – Restoring Visual Intelligence
If visual intelligence is eroding, it’s not because we’ve lost the ability to see. It’s because we’ve allowed the system to reward images that don’t require it. So if there’s a way forward, it starts by making work that refuses to play along. Not quieter. Not prettier. Just clearer. Less disposable.
That means starting with seeing, not chasing what the feed rewards. Selling isn’t the problem. Selling empty pictures is. In a landscape flooded with content, images with meaning might be the only thing left worth paying for.
This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about standards. The platforms aren’t going to change. But we can choose to work in a way that doesn’t default to garbage. Clarity is a decision. Depth is a choice. And sometimes, making something that holds up — really holds up — is the only rebellion we’ve got.
There’s an irony here. We may be seeing a correction — not in capital markets, but in the visual economy. Before digital, fewer photographers were making more per picture. Then everyone got a camera, and the bottom dropped out. But now that the visual vocabulary has collapsed into banality, the ones who can still tell a story are seeing their rates climb again. Maybe that digital flood was just irrational exuberance in the creative space. And maybe this is the correction. Photography isn’t supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to be difficult.