Smartphone cameras have lead to the age of the disposable image. 

It is not the first time this has happened of course, there have been other instances since the birth of photography. During the Victorian period, technologies such a albumen prints brought photographs to the masses. But then photography was a new phenomena, and seeing visual depictions of the world far away through photographs such as stereoviews, likely left people in awe.  New technology displaces old, and old photographs were soon forgotten in a drawer somewhere. For a good many years snapshots of time were captured using black-and-white paper photographs, which were then displaced by colour in various mediums – print, slide, instant photograph.

The concept of film slowly gave way to digital, which swept away the constraints of the physical medium. All of a sudden you could take hundreds of photographs, view them instantly, and not have to worry about having them developed. In 2018 alone, over 1 trillion photos were taken. How many photographs are there of the Eiffel Tower? The vast difference of course it that film technology left us with physical prints that sat in cupboards, or were framed. Digital photographs offer another form of disposable image, one which has an uber short lifespan. We don’t dispose of them, but rather just forget them.