Sunday, April 12, 2015

Photographing your food and everything else

Who was the first person to photograph all their meals? It seems a reasonably common thing now "26 out of 45 customers spend an average of 3 minutes taking photos of the food."
First Camera, Then Fork discussed the taking photos of your food phenomena but doesn't describe who initiated it.
But who was the first person to start photographing all their meals? Or indeed all their activities. Obviously its much cheaper for us to do now with smartphones but was there an eccentric Victorian lord who photographed everything? Life loggers have been around since the 1990s. I'd be surprised if none of them deliberately photographed their food at the time.
“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in 1825.

If food photos are much more popular how about all photos? How many photos are taken a day and how does that compare with in the past?

Facebook Photo uploads total 300 million per day
Instagram averages 70 million photos a day
Flickr 1 million photo shares a day
Photobucket says "More than 2.25 million images are shared daily"
There is a buzzfeed page on photo stats How Many Photos Have Been Taken Ever?
It’s estimated only a few million pictures were taken in the 80 years before the first commercial camera was introduced.
"By 1930, about a billion photos were taken a year." So in three days more photos are being uploaded onto facebook/instagram than then taken in the world in the 1930s.
"By 1970, about 10 billion photos were taken a year." Or a month of photos being put up onto facebook/instagram.
This article "This is What the History of Camera Sales Looks Like with Smartphones Included" has a great graph that explains why this huge increase in photo taking.


2 comments:

Paul A. Rubin said...

Better question: who was the first person to decide that documenting the minutiae of their life was more important than living it?

Pro Tip:If you're going to take a picture of ice cream, have the camera app loaded before the server brings it. Ice cream melts.

Iamreddave said...


>who was the first person to decide that documenting the minutiae of their life was more important than living it?

Great question Paul.