He probably did love the camera. He uses digital cameras all the time. He's talking about what digital is doing to photography. Nothing can be trusted any more. He's not just talking about the integrity of photo-journalism images either (although that is clearly a concern for many), but about how digital images are always manipulated now. Nothing is real. How photographers would now never, ever release an image unless it's manipulated in some way. He's talking about colour too. This is one thing that bothers me about it, particularly with landscape these days. It's as if reality has no place in landscape any more.
I'm not suggesting there's no place for unreality in photography. There always has been since it's invention, but it bothers me that everything... and I mean everything, has a layer of unreality added these days. No one, ever creates work that has nothing done to it. Increasingly, the world is starting to look nothing like the images we create that is meant to represent it. In a way, landscape has always had that expectation to a degree, but now EVERYTHING has this treatment, even photo-journalism. Recovered highlights, compressed dynamic range, saturated colours, lifted shadow detail.. you see these things in JOURNALISM now. No wonder Reuters have just insisted on straight JPEGs... well done I say. Even images of war and conflict are made with aesthetics in mind.
Many art forms reject reality, and as you all know, I have no problem with thinking of photography as art. However, what is happening now, is a wholesale rejection of reality as valid. Surrealism is not real for instance, but no one is pretending it's meant to be, neither is Dada, or futurism or any other art movement. However, we change
everything now.. nothing is truly accurate, but we fool ourselves that it is and think we we're actually reflecting and representing the world accurately. It's a slow creep, but we#'re heading to a situation where we will reject anything that's not "fantastic" in some aesthetic way - a world where only "wow" cuts it. This is what's prompted this rise in manipulated photo-journalism: A generation of digital photographers who feel as they're naked if they don't run their output through lightroom to arse around with some sliders to "improve" their imagery... give it a veneer of aesthetic to hide it's banality. People expect more and more "zing" and "wow" from their imagery to hold their shrinking spans of attention for a little bit longer in a world where this generation can't concentrate on anything for more than 10 seconds without being distracted by whatsapp or snapchat. I bet most 18 years old would have been desperate for a comma in that last sentence because it was too ****ing long for them