I’ve got a couple of young assistants in my studio, and I say look, you’re future is very vibrant…a lot of people are saying doomsday stuff right now, but I think the future is vibrant, it’s just going to be very different from mine. Talk about multitasking! They have to be good on the web, they are going to have to know video, audio, all that stuff. They’ll have to be kind of their own multifaceted entertainment-information package. They are going to have to bring lots of skills to the party. We learned how to do one thing well, and that was how to tell a good story with a camera in our hands.

–Joe McNally

via Conversation: Joe McNally | burn magazine.

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9 Comments

  1. I think Joe has part of it right, yes the younger generation needs to have extremely diverse story telling skills.

    What killed the dinosaurs is not being able to adapt to the changing future. The field of Fotografie overall has never been in a state of stasis. It has continually evolved. The way information is rapidly available today story tellers need to evolve ahead of the curve of change or they will become extinct.

    The coverage of the Boston terrorist bombing was minute by minute. Some news agencies blew it when reporting event that took place without verifying the facts.

    The new generation, I believe, will be more team oriented each member having their part of input to the story as a whole.

  2. To me, this means that the value of the images have greatly diminished, to a point that by themselves, they are no longer that valuable. They are worth something only part of a “multifaceted entertainment-information package”, even though they are the driving component of it.

    • Any doofus can push a button and make an image. Images in and of themselves have little value. This has always been the case.

      • craig, you know nothing about photography

        • funny, my client and cover list would suggest otherwise… but thanks for letting me know, dude from the internet.

          • Alright, I’ll expand rather than be straight snark.

            The point is, images don’t have a lot of value. Stories have value. Concepts have value. Production capabilities to produce an image have value – most ‘photographers’ don’t wrangle all the pieces to make something complex appear.

            But an image itself? Little value. It’s just information. Most of them live very short lives.

            Fine art is a little different, but even then – it’s the concept that has value, and then, if you’re famous (or infamous) enough, the story and name associated with the image has value.

            Images are merely conduits of information. Sure maybe when there were less of them, it was more interesting and thus more ‘valuable’, but hey, aluminum used to be more rare and expensive than gold. Napoleon brought out the aluminum silverware for only the most prestigious of dinner guests. Everyone else got gold.

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