Uneventful

In 2012, Facebook users added seven petabytes of images each month - 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 to which we are exposed.

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 Lead Producer, New Media Initiatives at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.