The Soul of the Camera

Introduction

I HAVE 20 CAMERAS IN MY OFFICE where I sit with my coffee, looking for the words to begin another book. Some of them are 50-year-old film cameras that rest on a shelf and remind me of my beginnings in this art, and they are too rarely used. Some are faithful workhorses, some go underwater. My latest camera flies. And one of them is a phone. I make, depending on the year, 100,000 photographs annually. Some of them are good. Most are not. And if the internet’s testimony about itself is to be believed, in 2014 we uploaded 1.8 billion images per day to social media sites like Instagram and Facebook. That’s 657 billion photographs a year, made by an equally astonishing number of cameras. That tells me two things. The first: there is an ...