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I have a theory for what truly killed photography and it's this camera specifically. Everything that ruined photography is documented in this one camera. This camera paints a picture of instagram addicted bike riders heading to starbucks to swig too much caffeine before watching a marathon of youtube gear reviews. It's this single piece of pretentious bafoonery that sapped all the creativity out of photography by showing people that they too can make instagram posts with faux-aggressive "film simulations" and throwing in unrelated hashtags. It is the prototype for social media now.
Photographically, everything that's wrong about current photography is found here. Fuji in all their Japanese wisdom thought that, instead of coming up with something interesting to shoot with, the mundane "film simulations" would resonate more with the instagram culture of mainstream America and, unfortunately, they were right. This was one of the key elements that was needed to allow angry suburban youth and pot head middle income earners to feel like real photographers. All of these things are best exemplified in the after school special-isms of Provia/standard and the cheap emotional appeals of Astia/Soft. The digital feeling suggests not a lot of time was spent on them, and feels more like something Pentax would have come up with. The change to a more "urban" appearance in promo pics suggest about as much. These film simulations would make photographers in the future reduce themselves to shooting mundane subjects (parked cars, street life) and tagging a bunch of unrelated words that have nothing to do with the photo. It's just vague photographs to "get more followers on instagram", copying the latest popular iphone shooters.
