Uneventful: The Rise of Photography

In 2012, Facebook users added seven petabytes of images each month - a massive 7,516,192,768 megabytes every four weeks. And the power of photographs to impact and move us diminishes as we are increasingly overwhelmed by the sheer number of images we are exposed to.

In this thought-provoking essay, author Jeff Gates examines how the nature of picture taking and picture making is changing, and explores how we interpret historic photographs in an environment in which sharing is starting to replace exhibiting.

Jeff Gates taught college photography for 23 years before joining the Smithsonian, where he is New Media Producer at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.