Was thinking about this in the middle of the night. Didn't reach any conclusions but I sympathize with Wenders, to an extent. Points:
- Mobile phone cameras caused the small-camera market to shrink dramatically. This gave Nikon at least serious problems for a while. They have seemed to recover but they left a few feathers behind.
- Photojournalism took a whack in the teeth. The Chicago Tribune for one got rid of its photog dept. and gave reporters iPhones.
- The demographic shifted. Before, not that many people carried a camera as a matter of course. Now, just about everyone has one. Given the combination of camera + Internet connection, everyone is a photojournalist of a sort, and the median standard is pretty dismal. On the other hand, pictures and videos of events round the world have gained immediacy, and some events that would have been passed off as fabrications have been exposed. I'm thinking of cop/black incidents in particular.
I think that the first part of my last point is the one Wenders was making, but I also think that he was missing the second part, which is of immense importance. Imagine the Kennedy assassination with 500 potential Zapruder films.
So:
- people who want to take good photographs will go on doing so, no matter what kind of camera they use.
- people who want to take bad photos ("this is me blocking off a wonderful view of Yosemite") will go on doing so, but with phones instead of small cameras.
- the latter will also flood social media with them, but does it matter? It certainly doesn't for serious photographers.
That's about as far as I've got.