Photos in America
Number of pictures taken: In 2001, 25 billion. In 2010, 75 billion. In 2015, 175 billion*
Devices used to share most digital photos: Phones (70 billion images), digital cameras (18 billion), tablets (3.5 billion).
Photos printed each year: 2001, 29 billion, 2010, 16.5 billion, 2015, 12 billion*.
What we take pictures of (with phones):
Family – 58 percent
Pets — 42 percent
Children – 42 percent
Landscape and scenery – 37 percent
Food – 32 percent
*forecast
Source: InfoTrends
Is there anything we won’t take a picture of?
We capture images of our dinner, our goofy pets and bodily wounds. I’ve recently heard about divorce selfies, which people take right after they cut the cord.
I interviewed a guy in Buckhead who happened to be walking past one of the few standalone camera stores left on the planet. I figured that made him as good of an expert as anyone. Bryan Walton confided that he had taken photos that very morning of empty Ferragamo and Gucci boxes a neighbor left a few feet from the community trash chute. Walton thought it was a sign of laziness, so “click,” he shared the image with friends.
Yes, it has come to this: we take photos of our neighbor’s garbage.
Which brings me to a 73-year-old named Chuck Wolf. If you’ve lived in Atlanta for a long time, you remember the name.
He was once a photo king, owner of about 700 specialty camera and photo stores, 70 of them in metro Atlanta. He regularly starred in his chain’s TV commercials. All of that is essentially gone now.
More than a decade after Wolf Camera went bankrupt and was sold, its founder is on a new, smaller quest. He’s opened a shop to make fancy physical prints of the bazillions of digital images we’ve shot and then lost track of. Exotic, right?
“I’m selling memories,” Wolf, ever the marketeer, tells me.
His place, called Chuck Wolf’s Photo Design Bar, is in Buckhead, which tends to have a fair number of folks who can probably afford the $75 an hour his young associates charge on special projects. Want an image of your Miniature Schnauzer put on a canvas? How about a photo massively enlarged and framed? Or maybe your favorite family pictures packaged into a photo book with the kids’ artwork and old letters?
“Someone could have surprised you for your birthday: ‘The Life of Matt,’ ” Wolf tells me. I feel like I’m the fish and he’s the one with a worm and hook.
Ego finds a way
I realize we can be just as self absorbed with physical prints as we can be with selfie sticks and our Facebook images. Ego finds a way, no matter the medium. And where there is ego, there is money to be made.
Never mind that some of the services Wolf offers are available from far bigger players, including Shutterfly, Walmart, CVS, Walgreens and Costco.
Wolf knows technology can be a pain. He’s betting that plenty of people who are in their 30s or older want help downloading and massaging and packaging their photos.
Walton, the Buckhead pedestrian who told me about his garbage shots, figures his generation was among the last to grow up taking print photos. He’s 29. Now, he shoots almost solely with his smart phone.
Once in a while he’ll drag the images to some digital external hard drive and, basically, forget them. This reminds me of the ending in the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when the prized Ark of the Covenant is effectively hidden from mankind simply by putting it in a vast warehouse. That’s where the ingredients of America’s family albums are these days, at least those that aren’t on Facebook.
“If I wanted to make a photo album,” Walton tells me, “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
Wolf does.
He doesn’t seem like a guy who resists technology. He whips out a tablet as fast as any six year old. He swipes through images he snapped on his phone: of his girlfriend, of one of his daughters eating octopus on a trip in Japan, of displays in a photo shop in Tokyo.
Wolf, who grew up in the business, built the second biggest specialty camera chain in the nation. His biggest rival, Ritz Camera, was led by one of his cousins.
But Wolf stretched too far, buying Fox Photo and spending heavily on expensive equipment meant to keep print film competitive with new digital cameras.
By 2001, the company filed for bankruptcy protection. His rivals at Ritz bought control of Wolf Camera. Eventually they faltered, too. One Wolf Camera store remains in Atlanta, owned by a New Jersey outfit with no connection to Chuck Wolf other than the name.
‘Last hoorah’
Wolf, who told me he is financially comfortable, said the year-old photo bar is about to break even. He’d eventually like to open a few more.
“This is my last hoorah in photography,” he said.
In the last 15 years, the number of photos taken has boomed amid the rush to smartphones. The year Wolf lost control of his photo empire, 25 billion photos were taken in the U.S., virtually all of them on film, according to InfoTrends, a market research and analysis firm. This year it predicts close to 175 billion photos will be shot. Most will be taken on phones.Who would have predicted that?
Our connections to photos aren’t what they were. There are so many images in our daily lives, it’s tough to give them more than a passing glance. Which makes me wonder if Wolf might outlive the demand for the business he has created.
“It used to be that photos were a real memento,” Robin Kelsey, a Harvard professor who specializes in the history of photography, told me.“They were looked at again and again with a layering of meanings.”
Now, he said, digital images “come into people’s lives and they go out again.”
We are much more open minded, though, about what we are willing to squeeze into the frame. Kelsey said he took a shot of a rainbow spiking into a McDonald’s billboard with a big smiley face. He’s also captures baristas’ designs in foam. And, of course, he’s taken lots of cat photos. He’s also tried taking selfies “so I can experience what it is like.”
Me, I just take selfies ‘cause I’m self-absorbed. Now, if only I could figure out how to make that photo book of myself.
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