Why has the line between professional and amateur photographers become blurred over recent years? Earlier this year I attended my cousin’s wedding. When I was included in the cliché family portraits on the day, I couldn’t help but notice the swarm of people taking photos of my family with their state-of-the-art DSLR cameras. I didn’t know which one to look at, until a short man in the middle of the paparazzi pack yelled, ‘Looking here please!’ To which my cousin in white replied, ‘yep, look at him, he’s the photographer’. So why, all of a sudden, do we have Uncle Bill, Cousin James, the neighbour and the best man hovering around ‘the photographer’ with their DSLRs and iPhones? You wouldn’t have seen that ten years ago. The photographer was just that, the photographer, after all, that’s what he was paid to do. This observation raises a very current question in today’s society—why has the line between professional and amateur photographers become blurred over recent years? To fully understand this question, we must go back to the birthplace of photography. In ancient times camera obscuras were used to form images on walls in darkened rooms, which were then traced by artists. After many years of technological improvement, in the early 1900s film became accessible to professional photographers. However, it wasn’t until the 1960s, when the modern day ‘point and shoot’ camera was introduced, that society really took hold of the photographic revolution. Coupled with the introduction of colour film, this sparked a cultural and social change in the way photography was used around the world. It was no longer the boring black and white portraits taken formally in a photographer’s studio... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
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