This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
TS Eliot, The Hollow Men
I've been reading Shutterbug Magazine since I started shooting -- since I was a teenager, in other words. The latest issue showed up the other day; the annual extravaganza covering the Photo Marketing Association's annual camera show.
The issue is always divided into sections: Large Format Cameras, Medium Format Cameras, and so forth. This issue had something new: the section on 35mm SLRs simply said that for the first time in the history of the PMA, not a single 35mm SLR was introduced.
But if you go back into
Shutterbug's archives, you'll see that as late as three years ago the magazine was still running "Should you go digital?" articles, and the PMA issue was so jammed with 35mm SLRs that coverage was limited to one entry per manufacturer.
But this is the way the revolution ends. A decade after all the "Will digital kill film?" angry debates, things just fade with hardly a murmer. Meanwhile, the classic camera companies are dying. Contax cameras have been discontinued. And PMA was rife with rumors that Leica had lost its line of credit, and whether that would mean the end of the company that invented 35mm.
Meanwhile, a decade after all of the sturm und drang over whether new media would mean the end of newspapers, the floors are quietly being covered in blood:
* Newspapers are so battered by search advertising that some have taken to acting as ad agents for their competition in an attempt to pick up some revenue, according to
= The New York Times.
* There was a small flurry of articles on yet another round of depressing circulation figures. The bottom line: a 1.9 percent drop over the last six months, continuing a steady decline since 1987. The
Wall Street Journal had a pretty nice analysis.
Do a little reading, and we'll talk about What It All Means -- hopefully tomorrow.
c