It’s amazing how quickly anyone can collect data these days. When I was a college student in the early 1980’s, I spent hours in the library scanning the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature in order to find accepted and vetted sources that could be cited in an essay, lab report, or paper for presentation. If you were born after 1985, it’s likely that you have no experience with the Reader’s Guide, or how essential they were for developing a fact-based piece of writing. So, it is with my background in writing both undergraduate and graduate theses with the aid of the Reader’s Guide, that I share these probable - but possibly dubious - “stats” about photography.

After prompting Google with a few pointed questions, I’ve learned the following:

According to PetaPixel.com, a well respected photography website, approximately 5.3 billion photos are taken each day. With the aid of a little math, this translates to approximately 221 million pictures per hour or 3.7 million snaps per minute.
About 1.3 billion photographs are shared to Instagram daily (you can see mine here), while Facebook averages 350 million photo shares per day (Cited: Omnicore Agency).
For those who share their photos to social media sites, you’ll be disappointed to learn that the typical person spends about 2.7 seconds on your photograph before swiping to another… (Google AI engine factoid).

So there it is, we live in a world that is saturated with images, and where everyone is a photographer. As a longtime hobby/semi-professional photographer, the ubiquity of picture taking and army of self-described photographers on this planet has been a bit of an existential conundrum for me. A casual review of this website and its many portfolios will reveal that the making of images and writing about them is a critical aspect of my identity. Knowledge that I have inextricably linked the “essence of me” to a practice performed by tens of millions of people each day, does little to bolster my own self-esteem and belief in a uniqueness that differentiates my mind from those who share the planet with me.

Yet, the recognition that throngs of photographers hike the woods, look for owls, photograph bears, craft landscapes, and wait for the sweet light has not dampened my enthusiasm for the process. In fact, this very reality seems to be a source of motivation that has caused my own process to evolve over and over again. While I shy away from competition, I am not one to remain constant when a regiment of clones shoot and share the same things. Seeing the work of my peers informs me about my own practice and pushes me to try and see differently.

In the end, photography is a salve for life’s complexity. It is an opportunity to embrace a singular experience and live in the moment. When peering through a viewfinder at a rising sun, streams of light emanating from the sky, or watching a squirrel emerge from its subterranean tunnel, I am lost in the experience. If I take a few moments every day to study the patterns in bark, the randomness of beach pebbles, or the probing of a sandpiper’s bill, I create an opportunity to ground myself and remember that I too am a part of the natural world.

Photography is the rare craft, discipline, and art that anyone can experience. If one were to take the process seriously and make their images with purpose, they too would create the opportunity to let go, focus, and simply be.