It’s no secret that mobile phones have led to the democratisation of photography. Anyone with one of these devices in their pocket now has ability to take a snapshot instantly regardless of where they are. The result has been a flood of images onto the internet, with social media platforms often serving as landfills accumulating millions upon millions of images. Some have gone as far as referring to this as the death of photography on account of the fact that professional photographers, who have spent years honing their craft, can no longer compete with the sheer mass of imagery in the market.
Like all forms of traditional media, photography has also been rocked by the digital age, leaving those who ply this trade in a very uncertain position. And while it’s relatively easy to now access photography of just about anything, a new campaign from Canon shows the important role good photography can still play in telling stories.
For the campaign, Canon invited photographers Chris Meredith, Jin Lim, Lyndal Irons, Kate Disher-Quill, Franky Tsang and Tristan Stefan Edouard to photograph a man. Each of the photographers were told a different story about the individual and then asked to capture the essence of who he was in their work.
The result of the experiment are staggering. Though each of the photographers took snapshots of the same person, their creative decisions in terms of lighting, lenses and perspective rendered utterly different results.
This campaign is presented in a similar vein to Canon’s previous work, which emphasised how different lenses can change the perspective of a story.
