A few weeks ago, I posted something about the word ‘photograph’ seeming anachronistic, or at least heading that way. It literally means ‘light writing’ and many, maybe even most images we see online nowadays never saw the light of day, pardon the pun, or else saw it so many iterations ago, as to be negligible. Academics have esoteric debates about whether photography is over, just beginning, or more important than ever before. Sometimes I think it is merely a semantic argument (or as described in a film about philosophy, a kind of ‘group verbal masturbation’). Except, when dealing with words, you have to be careful about suggesting they are ‘merely’ anything. Reality is constituted through an assemblage of words, sensation and media. So these things matter. They literally materialise the reality.
Here are two graphs showing usage trends for photograph, photo and image from 1800 to 2019 (which is as far as the Google data goes). It is a very simple analysis using Books Ngram Viewer, and linguists will have access to more powerful tools, with more complex findings. Also, it is limited to English. However, here the word image looks like it is now being used (in books at least) more often than it was, while photography has dipped. I am looking at the trend, rather than the absolute sum, where photograph remains greater than image and photo tops both. It should be said again, this is really basic analysis and could no doubt be easily countered. I wonder what the recent proliferation of AI images will have done to the trend lines though.
