In today’s society everybody hustles to the next stage in life. There is no doubt that modern marvels make things in life easier. Among so many things our automobiles are faster to get to work and we do not have to kill our food for dinner. Since the spout of industrialism our world has separated itself from so many things in so many ways.

In the good old days one could turn ice cream all day for a treat for a family to enjoy. Then in the 1960s you could go to the local soda jerk and watch them make your soda or sundae. Today you just ask and they bring one out to you. Most of our generation doesn’t even know what a soda is or why they all them sundaes.
These days to get furniture a person just drives to Art Van. The consumer has no knowledge of who build the work or where it even came from. While this is easy for the consumer and costs less, what happened to the person that poured pride into making a cabinet for somebody? Now, this is mostly done in a factory and since the work is produced in so many stages few even get to see the end product. Karl Marx dubbed this “the alienation of labor”. What is also interesting is how the factory that creates it not only pays workers low wages but is in a constant state of trying to manufacture it cheaper.

In photography, photographers use to have to buy paper, sensitize it and do everything mainly from scratch. They took pride in what they did and not everybody could do it. Over time photography has become easier for people to work with and more alien to the photographer. Even Albumen paper was produced in large factories so that people could sensitize it. Then cames the silver gelatin papers which made it so people did not have to sensitize paper. The darkroom was replaced by people sending in negatives made by the Brownies. In color photography the die transfer process was wiped out by PhotoShop and replaced with ink spitters that we call printers. Now some Kmart stores are abandoning photo processing because they can not profit with large internet digital photo producers. How alien is that? You do not even see who produces your photographs!

What happened to the candy store, cabinet makers, and soda jerks of yesterday? Have the modern day bourgeoisie sucked them all into the proletariat positions of factories. It seems unsettling that the small businesses that produce and see the work from beginning to end are fading while factories grow. I hope that photography never falls completely into the industrial complex. For my thesis I want to defend the small businesses that are on the brink of extinction and becoming archaic with a beautiful process that is now considered extinct and archaic.