More on FAQ #309

“Photography will always be able to do two things that no other medium can do — not even video.”

1. Photography is uniquely able to create in a fraction of a second an extremely precise visual record of a single moment in time (or a record of “what one person saw, in one small corner of the world, at one unrepeatable moment in time,” as it says in FAQ #120).

By definition video records a succession of moments, not a single moment. Even when the subject of a video is motionless, the video is still a depiction of how that motionless subject looks over a succession of moments.

 

2. Photography is uniquely able — among all electronically recorded visual media — to present records in a format that can be viewed without electricity, in any lighting, and without any playback device, whether that viewing happens in the present or hundreds of years later.

That capability is built into P6 of the Trust Test, so there is no such thing as a TTG photo that does not have that capability.

 

Photography has never been bigger.

Every year more photographs are taken than the year before, and there is no end in sight of that trend.