The new role of the image...?

Someone talked to me recently, told me that it'd take very long to take a great shot. You wake up before dawn, he said, you go on top of a tall building, talk your way in, if you have to. Or you schlepp yourself from street to street, the body of your camera dangling off your neck, the strap grinding its way to your bladebone. A quasimodo-to-be, ten years from now. Or you swarm around troublemakers, a parasite digging invisible, needle-like arms into the open pores of their subject/object. 

You get the right angle, turn a little wheel on your camera, correct your lighting, click, you got your shot. 

It sounds like an idealist's ode to the photojournalist. And yes, there seem to be a few great photographers out there, who seem to be able to live for a month on one photo's earnings. 

But the viewer clicks on. To photo slideshows, photo series, photos tagged in albums, to interactive maps and graphics. And so a photographer either goes on a scavenger hunt for the next interactive map, running from one building/person/event to the next; or has to take mug shots of 50 people who give representative opinions, Man-On-The-Street polls on the elections, Britney Spears, Detergent; or is s/he is one of 40 random photographers who work for Getty Images, the AP, Reuters, Corbis, who contribute namelessly to a larger project. 

It slaps the photog ego in the face, which is sort of satisfactory to me. It takes away from Walter Benjamin's prediction that photography politicizes/is inherently politicized due to its fake objectivity, its need for a verbal framing. Now the multimedia framing negates its singularity. Takes away from its wordlessness. Contextualizes the photograph for the consumer, while s/he is just as capable of re-contextualizing the image through posting it on facebook/blogger.  The image has become a free-floating currency. The iconic image mutates into a malleable (both in size and meaning) broche, worn, traded, bought, lost, sold. And it loses its charisma, or to use Benjamin's vocabulary, its aura, once more.