Photography as a purly utalitarian medium

v1fan wrote:

The main problem why photography does not have a future as an art form is quite simple, there are no means and ways to understand what is a good photograph today - thanks to digital technology.

The look department is pretty much taken care of by software and the subjects are pretty much the same as they were in the beginning of photography, nothing else is left in photography that someone could aspire to.

When there is no challenge left and no clear goals then naturally what follows is a simple activity, like writing a journal but instead using photos, a personal journal means something to the person who wrote it but for others its completely boring and useless, this is the reality of photography today, basically everyone's photos are like their personal journal, therefore something very personal and irrelevant to everyone else and hence very far from art.

The best a photographer could aspire to in the past was publishing a book, well, today one can do that very easily by using blurb etc, but then everyone is doing it so whats the point?