I often wonder if the photographic greats of the past like Ansel Adams, Fay Godwin or Yousaf Karsh would have achieved the same level of popularity if they had of been born in our digital age. As talented as they were, the competition today is fierce. Every second person seems to have an SLR, and even if they don’t, they will invariably have a phone and or compact camera. It is staggering the amount of shots that pump through a site like Flickr every second of every day.Experiments are done from time to time where a famous shot from the past is posted anonymously on a photographic forum. More often than not it is ripped apart by the masses who don’t recognize it!

Would Henri Le Secq be able to regularly feature on Flickr’s ‘7 days of interestingnesssss’, or would he told to only submit photos that are faded, are of an iphone 4, or have a pretty girl and a flower in it on day 6!

Would Vivian Maier be labeled a terrorist for photographing street scenes in New York?

Nickolas Muray might be told that his portraits were ‘noob like’ and obviously ‘shopped’!

Would Ansel be told by the magazines that, whilst his Yosemite photos are interesting, he really needs to shoot less ‘rocks’ and more ‘tits and ass!’

Weegee routinely used an old Speed Graphic film camera. I bet he didn’t even know how many megapixels it had. Do you? ;)