So Steve Jobs is dead at 56. It is a terrible thing that we lose a such beautiful mind at a time when Apple can be tempted to cash on their achievements. But this is not a place to discuss the future, only photography.
There are 3 thoughts I have about Mr Jobs and photography.
The first concerns beauty. Everyone who unpacked a Macintosh computer knows how much Mr Jobs was concerned about aesthetics. Everything had to participate to the experience, from the packaging down to the innards of a computer that no customer was supposed to see. We know this, but what we may not know is that Mr Jobs had the same concern in his private life, striving for the beautiful and the simple.
As photographers, we should also strive for the beautiful (not the pretty) and the simple. Mr Jobs always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things you decide not to do. In a picture, the most important decisions are not what your chose to include in the frame, but the things you decide not to include in the frame.
Going into Steve Jobs' house, you would see that he had almost no furniture in it. He just didn't believe in having lots of things around. Can you find the beautiful and the simple by living in clutter? Maybe there is a teaching in that: can you portrait the beautiful and the simple with complicated tools? Or should we strive for the beautiful and the simple in our instruments as well? Some cameras, of any type, are paragons of industrial design. Some people think that they need more features, more powerful systems, more optics, bigger computers and software. Do we want to carry lots of photo stuff around? How can we reach simplicity with that? Shouldn't tools be beautiful and simple as well?
The second thought concerns Mr Jobs photographic legacy. Since I fancy myself doing hi-fi recordings, I will make an analogy with high end audio here: high end audio is dead. There is simply no public left for it, except dinosaurs: no-one is ready today to sit in a carefully arranged room in front of a pair of speakers to recreate the experience of a live concert. People listen to music on headphones, or have a small system near their desk. And people use iPods. It is not that the iPod cannot do high-end hi-fi if you connect it to a pair of speakers in a carefully arranged room, it is that people are not interested in the carefully arranged pair of speakers. Exit hi-fi, enter the iPod.
I'll be tempted to say: exit the print, enter the iPhone. Just as people lost interest when audio reproduction had evolved to almost perfection, people lost interest when digital photography overtook what people needed. Who needs 80 millions pixels when the major distribution channel for pictures is a 1920x1024 jpeg? Enter the iPhone, a small camera, tons of software to manipulate the data and express yourself in the constraints of a limited size jpeg and the means to post it immediately where the people you know will see it. Digital photography had come of age.
The third thought came to me when I saw Mr. Jobs portrait on Apple's website. I don't know who took that picture, but what great work! There are few great portraits of men and even less of the elderly. But this is a masterpiece. Go see it yourself:
http://www.apple.com/