It's all over
I often think of an essay I read a while ago by a prize-winning photojournalist who had tracked down Pol Pot deep in Cambodia, had taken pictures of him, spoken with him, conveyed this historical figure’s own guilty and complicated and monstrous human subjectivity to readers. The essay was about the recent difficulty this journalist had been having paying his bills. He noted that his teenage niece, I believe it was, had racked up many millions more views on Instagram, of a selfie of her doing a duck-face, than his own pictures of Pol Pot would ever get. She was an influencer, poised to receive corporate sponsorship for her selfies, not because any human agent ever deemed that they were good or worthy, just as no human agent ever deemed “Johnny Johnny Yes Papa” good or worthy, but only because their metrics signaled potential for financialization.
My own book may be crap, but I am certain, when such an imbalance in profitability as the one I have just described emerges, between photojournalism and selfies, that it is all over. This is not a critical judgment. I am not saying that the photos of Pol Pot are good and the selfies are bad. I am saying that the one reveals a subject and the other reveals an algorithm, and that when everything in our society is driven and sustained in existence by the latter, it is all over.
~ Justin Smith, 'It's All Over'
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