WHEN President Nixon travels abroad, what do members of his official entourage do in their spare time? They take amateur pictures of the memorable sights. At the Great Wall of China, Nixon's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, happily snapped away like any ordinary tourist. In Warsaw, Presidential Aide H.R. Haldeman leaned out of a moving car to take pictures of a friendly crowd—and he was banged up when the vehicle suddenly lurched to a stop. Whether abroad or at home, Americans are in the midst of a photo binge, taking more and more amateur pictures of people, places and things.
The new popularity is transforming photography from mere hobby to a natural, even essential way of looking at the world and capturing life as it is. Photo galleries, many selling the work of professionals at $25 per print and up, have opened by the dozen in large cities. The craft has found some of its most devoted followers among the young, who increasingly strive to document their own new lifestyles and find photography, with its blending of technology and aesthetics, an honest way to do so. As a part of this view-finding process, photography has become one of the fastest growing subjects in education: photography courses are offered at some 700 universities, junior colleges and adult education centers. Tens of thousands of Viet Nam vets have become serious about photography after buying expensive 35-mm. cameras at big discounts in the Far East. At rock concerts and in youth hangouts from Central Park's Bethesda Fountain to California's Santa Monica beach, there are almost as many camera straps as headbands in evidence.
Some 42 million Americans, or about one in five, are photographers of one sort or another. Amateurs snap away at an astonishing rate, taking more than 5 billion pictures annually, or about 158 each second, night and day, all year long. Their purchases of film, cameras, flashbulbs and processing services are the backbone of a more than $4 billion-a-year industry. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that photography will be the second-or thirdfastest growing industry in the economy during the 1970s, rising an average 8% or 9% a year.
The public's interest in photography has always leaped highest whenever new cameras, making picture-taking even simpler and more reliable, have reached the market. This year, for the first time in nearly a decade, cameras and films for amateurs are undergoing a revolutionary change. The new American cameras are not only easy to operate but, more important, easy to carry. They are so compact, compared with their predecessors, that they can be toted in pocket or purse, more like a wallet or a pack of cigarettes than a piece of hand luggage. The era of pocket photography is here, and it promises to make the camera a spectacularly more usable possession. If leaders of the photo industry are right, many consumers will want to carry one around nearly everywhere, having it ready to employ as a kind of visual notepad.
The small-camera sweepstakes began three months ago when Kodak introduced its five-model line of pocket