A Day with no Photography

Imagine, if you will, a day with no electricity or a day with no automobiles or a day with no telephone service.  None at all--anywhere...

Now imagine a day upon which no photos are taken. Sure we would miss photos of secret terrorist bases in the desert taken by satelite and we would be inconvenienced by having to wait a while for our driver's license photo or our passport photo or, if it were a Saturday, those horrid overpriced digital wedding photos, but the world would not come to an end.  There would be no microscopic photos of germs in medical labs or photos of microchips undergoing inspection at Intel, but one day would not slow medical research or chip production.

No, a day without photography would be pretty much like any other day.  Most people would not even notice that their camera did not work for 24 hours--even most professional shooters would survive the inconvenience and loss of income.

Perspective.

Thinking about a day without photography is a good way to put the importance of photography into perspective.  Of course, without the motion studies of how a horse runs by Eadweard J. Muybridge  a century or so ago, we humans would still not know exactly how it is that a horse runs, but it would not have prevented one single horse from running.